DO WE PRAY?

"Oh Rabbi, I really loved the prayers your congregation recites. They speak to me much more than what I'm used to at other synagogues. Here, I don't feel like I need to check my beliefs at the door."

The quote above is a paraphrase of comments I've heard since I first began to lead Humanistic Shabbat services fifteen years ago in Boca Raton. I arrived there as a Reform rabbi with a strong non-supernatural streak, the result of a fix-up by none other than Rabbi Wine himself.

After acknowledging their feelings, I have always been careful to teach them that—as non-theists—we have dispensed with the notion of prayer. Lately, I've been re-thinking that response.

Side by side with Rabbi Wine's rejection of supernatural belief, came an insistence that Humanistic Judaism never left religion behind. In fact, our approach is actually a kind of reclamation project—one that recognizes that religion is not simply belief in God, but an organized expression of a unique philosophy of life. For Jews like us, it provides exactly the same kind of Jewish communal structure for ritual, meaning, memory, and moral practice. 

If Judaism is to be a living culture of memory, ritual, story and peoplehood, its religious dimension must serve ethical self-commitment and shared identity. Supernatural beliefs and theism are not requirements for that. Indeed, for us they are an impediment.

Judaism is, of course, much more than merely religion. But that said, it is very much a culture that produced religious forms—more accurately, a variety of Judaic religions. Most peoples have some kind of unifying set of religions precisely because, as Rabbi Wine taught, they supply the communal structure through which ritual, meaning, memory, and moral practice are sustained. This helps us to understand why religion remains so central to Jewish culture and heritage.

Our people's antiquity has also meant that what we today call Jewish religion(s) is—at its very heart—a people’s tradition: a long sequence of generations forming communities, telling stories, building identity, and exploring responsibility. All of this is religious in the broad sense, bringing us as Jews into our lineage of meaning. It does so by providing indispensable rituals of passage (birth, coming-of-age, marriage, death), and embedding the examination of values collectively. One of the key vehicles of all of this is prayer.

Which returns us to the question at hand. Do we pray?

In English, the words "pray" and "prayer" most certainly convey the meaning of pleading to an external power. But this is not necessarily true in Jewish tradition.

In Hebrew, the word for "prayer" is tefilah / תפילה and "to pray" is lehitpalel / להתפלל.

Rhetorically speaking, this gives us a glimpse into ancient spiritual psychology through fascinating evidence of linguistic evolution. The root of these Hebrew words means “to judge,” “to arbitrate,” or “to intercede.” But the word that evolved to mean “to pray” is in a reflexive verb form—a form that always indicates something one does to or for oneself. Thus lehitpalel can, and should, be understood as turning inward, examining our own lives, and recommitting to our values.

Is this not exactly what we do in our services? This idea resonates with me.

When we perform these rituals, we are naming our own aspirations and affirming our own responsibilities. This is tefilah in the Jewish sense: holding ourselves accountable through morally reflective, ritually anchored self-judgment.

The English word “prayer” may be inadequate to contain these meanings. But Judaism is not an English culture—it is an ancient Hebraic tradition that continues to evolve in new directions. Rabbi Wine and other non-theistic Jews could easily have abandoned the religious elements of our heritage, but they did not. (He was a rabbi, after all!) He chose instead a modern approach to Judaism’s religious traditions that preserves Jewish identity, ritual, and community.

Our approach does not direct our attention upward to a deity. It does, however, focus us inward and outward toward human dignity and responsibility.