Praise God
A dear friend of mine, a thoughtful Jew, asked me to talk to him about prayers of praise. We were both at the Synagogue, coming out of services, so his question was pertinent to the moment we had experienced. The Saturday service is a steamroller affair: two-and-a-half hours of communal singing, centered on a lection from the annual Torah reading cycle and punctuated by words of explication from the rabbi. A very small element consists of prayers of petition. A little bit more falls into the category of thanksgiving.
The vast majority of the service takes the form of praise. Blessed are You! God is One! There is no God like You, no lord, no savior! My friend wanted to know how I sat with all of this. Why does the service take this form? Does God really need this flattery, this….fawning? And if God needs it, why should we worship Him? A God this thirsty feels like a God who has failed, but who needs to be reassured that He is still Our Hero.
I suggested that he probably knew the answer. Many traditions, our own included, are rooted in the reality of a chaotic universe. Bad things regularly happen to the blameless. They also happen to truly bad people, and it is sometimes difficult to discern the pattern. The Talmud boldly offered that it was hard to figure out. “Where is goodness….Where is length of days?” (Kiddushin 39b)
But that didn’t keep people from feeling desperate. They imagined God as an interventionist force who could avert disaster or at least lessen its severity. That is the foundation of the High Holiday liturgy. Their solution was a combination of various strands—supplication, self-abasement and, most especially, praise. If God heard the flattering words of those who worshipped Him, He might relent and bring healing and salvation.
For people like me—skeptical and questioning—that’s a technology that no longer works. It didn’t just happen; it’s been going on for years. I love the community-building experience of prayer. Whatever I’m singing, when I sing it with others, I feel comfortingly ensconced with my people, my tribe. Communal prayer, regardless of its content, works as a way of connecting with the People Israel in a way that feels nourishing and emotionally resonant. If I miss anything about the active rabbinate, it’s the experience of generating the music of public prayer standing at a podium and singing into a microphone.
What I have put behind me is the yardage of praise. I am deeply grateful for the blessings of my life and I regularly express that to others and to the Universe. If you’re the one who solves my problem at the Genius Bar, I will write a note to Apple praising you to the skies. If you’re the Great Force who produces hyacinths every spring, I’ll go down on my knees to bless our collective good fortune. But there are too many dead babies in the mass graves of the Sho’ah to go ape over the supernal goodness of God.
Yet looking back, I wonder if I answered too quickly. I think I’m right about the nature of the universe and the God who has failed to stir Himself to rescue, regardless of the compliments we billow in His direction. But the traditional prayerbook serves another function. Every compliment, every word of praise is an opportunity to meditate on a critical value: compassion, loyalty, forgiveness, and activism. When I praise the God of Israel for being “rofay cholim,” healer of the sick, I am naming a quality that I hope to embody. I want to be the kind of person, and be part of the society, that sees healing and renewal as a central aspiration. The same with redemption, the same with justice, and the dozens of other qualities for which we praise our God. Think of the prayerbook, not as a fanzine, but a manual of practice for mindful conduct: loving mercy, doing justly, walking humbly through a broken world. If it turns out that God does all those things with us, so much the better, but the call of the prayerbook, expressed in words of praise, remains useful and operative as a checklist of values.
The point here is the recasting of a problematic text as a checklist of demands we need to make of ourselves. The imitation of God as the prayerbook imagines Him is one of the central preoccupations of traditional Judaism. What God may need from us is another story. Words of praise are a useful technology for shaping a worthy life and a worthy soul.