Jewish Prayer (and Jury Duty)

This blog post began as a Facebook note which I posted this past March, when I was summoned to jury duty for the first time. I wrote it as a Facebook note because I knew that if I tried writing it as a blog post, I'd feel pressured to treat it as a definitive, authoritative, comprehensive essay on Jewish prayer, and I would never end up finishing it. Now that I've written this disclaimer, I feel fine posting it here. :)

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Artwork: Reality Strobe, by Dan Scott

Jewish Prayer (and Jury Duty)

I always begin my introductory tefilah (prayer) classes by teaching my students the difference between the common religious notion of prayer and Judaism's concept of tefilah. This difference is reflected in the etymology of the words we use for each activity. 

The English word "pray" comes from the Latin "precari" which (according to Google) means "to ask earnestly" or "to beg." In stark contrast, the root of tefilah (תפילה) is P.L.L. (פ.ל.ל.) which means "to judge" or "to evaluate." When we speak of prayer as a verb, in Judaism we use the reflexive form "le'hitpalel" (להתפלל) which means "to self-judge" or "self-evaluate." [Note: from this point on I will use the Yiddish verb "daven" in reference to tefilah in order to avoid confusing it with the non-Jewish concept of prayer.]

On the surface, it would seem to be a contradiction to say "le'hitpalel to God." How can we use a reflexive verb to describe an action directed to a subject which is not the self (i.e. God)? 

The answer to this question cuts to the core of what tefilah is. According to my understanding, is that le'hitpalel means "to judge oneself in God's framework" - that is to say, to evaluate who we are, what we need, and what we have been given, all in the framework of objective reality (i.e. through "the eyes" of God). 

Tefilah can be thought of as the ultimate "reality check," in which we attempt to bring our subjective wants in line with our objective needs, and in line with the objective reality of God's will. In assessing our needs and thinking about how to obtain them, we are forced to confront our own limitations - which factors are in our control, and which are not, and how dependent we are on God's righteousness, justice, and mercy. From this position of humble recognition, we ask God to assist us in those areas which are outside of our control. 

This last point brings us to another significant difference between tefilah and prayer. We ask for Divine assistance because we believe in the possibility of Divine intervention. However, getting our tefilos answered is not the main reason why we daven. The essential value of davening lies in the personal growth and understanding we gain from the act of self-reflection in the framework of objective reality. 

I will attempt to illustrate this through a real-world example. Earlier this year I was summoned for jury duty for the first time. Day #1 was a terribly boring, stressful, bureaucratically inept experience. The jury selection process didn't even begin until late in the afternoon, and I didn't get called up until the very end. Shortly after I finally got called up, we were dismissed and instructed to come back the next day. 

During the interval between Day #1 and Day #2, I found myself in a state of conflict between my wants and my needs, and at the mercy of forces beyond my control - in other words, the perfect opportunity for tefilah! 

From a purely subjective standpoint, my wants were clear. Jury duty thus far had been miserable, annoying, and incredibly inconvenient for myself, my students, and my colleagues. The school needed to get other teachers to substitute for the eight classes I'd be missing, and most of my classes didn't lend themselves to continuing on in the unit without me. I wanted nothing more than to be back in school, teaching my students. 

The simple tefilah would have been to request to get out of jury duty. However, as I thought about how to formulate my request in tefilah, I admitted to myself that the desire to get out of jury duty stemmed largely from selfish desires. 

I then tried thinking about this in terms of my objective needs, and the objective needs of those around me. I found myself confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand, I was needed at school by my students and by my coworkers as a teacher of Torah. On the other hand, I was needed by the American Justice System, and by the individuals involved in this particular case. This realization was bolstered by my observation of how many unqualified people were in the jury pool, and how my presence as a Talmudically-trained, justice-minded, thinking juror would be an asset to all who were involved. 

I gave quite some thought as to how to formulate my tefilah to address this conflict - to balance my wants with the demands of objective justice, righteousness, and kindness, but to do so in a manner that would be genuine, and wouldn't involve lying to myself and asking for something I didn't truly want. 

In the end, I arrived at the following formulation: "please help me to be of the greatest service to my fellow human beings" - whether that resulted in me serving on the jury, or getting off jury duty and returning to my students. This was a request that I was able to make with honesty which factored in my recognition of my own bias from my selfish preferences and my lack of knowledge as to which outcome was truly better. 

I ended up getting turned down in the jury selection process at the end of Day #2, which made me quite happy. I am not a navi (prophet), so I have no way of knowing whether my tefilah played any role in this outcome. But I do know one thing with certainty: the activity of davening (i.e. self-evaluation in the framework of objective reality) was extremely beneficial for my development as a Jew and as a human being, and that alone made my tefilah valuable.