For 2013. We present our book in serial format on our blog - God's Favorite Prayers
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The Mystic’s
Prayers
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The Mystic’s
Prayers
Kad·dish
[Ashk. Heb. kah-dish; Seph. Heb. kah-deesh]
–noun, plural Kad·di·shim
[Ashk. Heb. kah-dish-im; Seph. Heb. kah-dee-sheem]. Judaism.
1. (italics) a liturgical prayer, consisting of three or six verses,
recited at specified points during each of the three daily services and on
certain other occasions.
2. (italics) Also called Mourner’s
Kaddish. The five-verse form of this prayer that is recited at
specified points during each of the three daily services by one observing the
mourning period of 11 months, beginning on the day of burial, for a deceased
parent, sibling, child, or spouse, and by one observing the anniversary of such
a death.
3. Kaddishim, persons
who recite this prayer.
—Random House Dictionary, 2010
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I
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n my spiritual quest in scores of synagogues, not surprisingly I sought
after and expected to meet up with some mystical personalities. After all,
mystical traditions are inextricably associated with the religions of the
world.
Allow me introduce
you to Hannah the mystic, one such ideal type whom I met. To do this, I first
must take you way back to the earliest description in Tanakh of an individual
reciting a prayer at a sacred shrine. The brief narrative from I Samuel chapter
1 tells us about the Israelite woman Hannah, who recited the first silent prayer
in the biblical record at the tabernacle at Shiloh.
The biblical Hannah’s
story is a sad one. She was childless and she wanted a child, so she came to
the tabernacle entrance and just went ahead and poured out her soul directly to
God. Every successor to Hannah who prays to God in a synagogue, Temple, or
anywhere, engages in an analogous mystical act and shares in the belief that
his or her words or thoughts somehow unacoustically travel to God’s ear.
Here is Hannah’s
short narrative:
Once, when they had
finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up. Now Eli the priest was
sitting on a chair by the doorpost of the Lord’s temple.
In bitterness of
soul Hannah wept much and prayed to the Lord. …
As she continued
praying before the Lord, the priest Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was speaking
in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli
took her to be a drunken woman.
Eli (to Hannah):
How long will you go on being drunk? Put your wine away.
Hannah: No, my lord,
I am a woman troubled in spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink,
but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant
as a worthless woman, for all along I have been speaking out of my great
anxiety and vexation.
Eli: Go in peace,
and may the God of Israel grant your petition that you have made to him.
Hannah: Let your
servant find favor in your eyes.
Then the woman went
her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad.
Eli the priest could
not understand that Hannah, or any sober person, could think that they could
speak directly yet silently to God. The priest believed that only he and his
brethren controlled the access to the sacred. All requests had to be vocalized
and ritualized, and had to go through him, according to his ways and the
directions of the holy place. Eli acted as if he was the gatekeeper of heaven,
as he is depicted in the story, sitting on a chair at the entrance to the
Temple. As told, once Hannah explains her acts, Eli accepts her sincerity and
intercedes for Hannah. He assures her that God will grant her non-vocal
request.
Eli had for Hannah,
in this anecdote, just one accusatory and rhetorical question. I have more to
ask Hannah about what she thought that she was doing there at the sacred place
of Israelite worship. Here are some of the things that I want to know:
Hannah, what was your imagined experience while standing at the holy site
and reciting your prayers?
When pouring out your soul, did you feel transported to heavenly realms
to be with the angels, closer to God?
Did you seek to relive the experiences of salvation, along with the
Israelites, as they miraculously walked through the dry land of the split sea
on their way out of slavery in Egypt?
Did you want to sense the excitement of the anticipation of the
redemption of Israel at the end of days and to hear the footsteps of the coming
of the messiah?
As these questions
suggest, along the spectrum, I want to explore and better understand the
mystical, the mythic, and even the kabbalistic varieties of direct religious
experiences and their qualities and intensities.
The biblical Hannah
appears to me at first to represent a mystic at the most basic, entry level,
i.e., one who seeks an encounter with God by talking to him. Everyone praying
in the synagogue emulates the biblical Hannah the mystic, the founder of all
silent personal prayer in Judaism, an archetype of Jewish religious liturgical
experience. She explained her actions to Eli the priest at ancient Shiloh. He
was satisfied by her explanation and told her that God will grant her request.
More advanced mystics
may engage in a fuller experience, with more bells and whistles. They may delve
further into the mythic life of religion, which
I speak about below. And the most advanced mystics may reach out to even more
transcendental and esoteric categories of experience, like those associated
with the later Kabbalists.
Let’s meet Hannah’s
direct contemporary descendants in our synagogue and ask them to explain to us
more about the experiential notions of Judaism that they find there.
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