Editor’s Note: Rabbi Yeruchem Eilfort of Chabad of La Costa entertains your questions about the Jewish religion and customs. You may submit a question to him at RabbiE@ChabadatLaCosta.com.
Q: Why do we need to use a Siddur (prayer book) to pray? Why can’t I simply share with G-d my personal feelings, wants, and needs? Why would someone think that the men who wrote the prayer book a couple of thousand years ago would have a better approach for me to reach G-d than I would myself?
A: Regarding your question about prayer: both the prayer of the individual and the prayer from the prayer book are necessary. It is not an either – or proposition.
Why is the prayer book needed?
The Jewish ethic is that we hold the Rabbis in very high esteem, particularly the Men of the Great Assembly who put together the earliest parts of the Siddur. They were incredibly scholarly and righteous, and lived at the end of the Biblical period during the times of Ezra. A tremendous amount of scholarship and effort was put into composing the prayers. It is akin to a computer specialist. You can certainly try to figure out on your own how to get your computer to do all of the things it is capable of, but if you really want to maximize the potential of the computer using a specialist will certainly help. The manual, the Siddur, is deep and profound and is the shortest and most efficient path to reach Hashem. Also, remember that these days prayers take the place of sacrifices. With that in mind the Rabbis composed the prayer book. They were experts both in prayer and in the human condition.
Remember, there is much more to prayer than asking for what we need (although that is certainly an important component of the Mitzvah of Tefilah). Connecting to Hashem and having that connection inform our lives all of the time are also major components. The Rabbis devised a way to cover both in the way most likely to succeed.
I want to go into a bit more detail about the Rabbis. The Rabbis of the Great Assembly had prophetic understanding of G-d and the Torah. The Rabbis of Talmudic times are considered to have written their commentary with Ru’ach HaKodesh — divine inspiration. Out of the tens of thousands (and much more) of the Jews who studied the Torah fervently (to the extent that Torah study was their entire vocation), those mentioned in the Talmud were the cream of the crop. The very top Jewish scholars of all time.
The Talmud was compiled over centuries. The opinions quoted within it were analyzed and cross examined from every conceivable angle over a period of centuries, by tens of thousands of scholars who did nothing all day but study Torah. The truth is, once an opinion is cited in the Talmud (or even in the later Halachic works) you can be assured that it has been vetted to the extreme. Every question that we (with our limited knowledge) may have, has been asked and answered (IF it was a good question). I may not know the answer off the top of my head, but the answer exists – of this I am sure. If there is a piece of Talmud that I do not understand, it is not because it is illogical or wrongheaded, it is because I am not properly understanding it or I am missing a critical piece of information. Our assumption always is that the Torah as expounded in the Talmud is correct and any deficiency in understanding it is our intellectual shortfall. The foundation of this belief is the notion that we believe that the Torah comes from G-d. It is divine. And it is how we, as limited created beings, can connect ourselves to the infinite G-d.
This approach is obviously based upon the critical need for intellectual humility; the willingness to consider things outside of our own immediate experience and knowledge base, and it is founded on the realization that others know better than me.
All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t ask questions. We absolutely must ask questions! For when we ask questions of ourselves and others we open up our minds to learning! So your questions are, by definition, wonderful things. At the same time, being open to “hearing” answers is also an obvious necessity.
During the period of the Enlightenment people were trained to question everything and to value empirical evidence – evidence that was directly observable. That is something we Jews have always done, beginning with Avraham when he was a young boy and came to understand through logical means that there is but One G-d. But there is an interesting difference in that we base our questions on the unshakable conviction that the Torah is the Word of G-d, the will and wisdom, and the positive mandate for us to live by. Healthy skepticism is a cornerstone of modern intellectual pursuits. That is why it is essential to understand that the Rabbis in the Talmud were thoroughly vetted. Their names only appear because they withstood the test of intense vetting by scholars and saintly personalities of the highest order. I put my faith in them and the process that brought them to prominence. I trust that the great Rabbis who venerated Rabbi Akiva, for instance, did so because they saw, with their own eyes, his brilliance and righteousness. They were able, as peers and colleagues with encyclopedic knowledge, to dissect his teachings. The fact that he is held up as a scholar is a demonstration that he stood up to the tests.
We have a choice: we can either trust our Sages or we can approach the subject as though we know more; that we have some insight that they somehow lacked, or that we can poke holes in their reasoning that the tens of thousands of contemporary Talmudic students were not able to grasp and articulate (although they did precisely that when they did find inconsistencies). Yes, there is a certain measure of faith involved, but it is a faith that is born because of what we see/know instead of being in spite of what we see/know. See the difference?
Bottom line: it is good to ask questions! We must be sure to ask them from a place of appropriate intellectual humility and faith that our great scholars from past generations were respected and became renowned because they stood up to the test of skeptical cross examination and severe intellectual probing by those who with a vast knowledge base.
*
Rabbi Eilfort is the Director of Chabad at La Costa and welcomes readers’ comments and questions submitted via email to RabbiE@ChabadatLaCosta.com.