Growing up in the Orthodox Jewish community, I had the privilege of being deeply immersed in Jewish education. I attended an Orthodox Jewish day school, youth programs from multiple youth groups, and Jewish summer sleepaway camp from a young age. Not only did I have this immense set of resources to glean from, I also grew up in a vibrant Jewish home. My parents were committed to making Judaism into a fun and meaningful experience for us to be excited about. We sang at the Shabbat table every week, we had special Shabbat sugar cereals, we built and decorated the Sukkah as a family every year. Although many folks in the Orthodox community might take these things for granted, they are encounters with the fullness of Jewish living that not all Jews get to experience.
I preface my piece with this because, despite having a very full Jewish upbringing, an essential Jewish practice was never mentioned. It wasn’t missing per se, but it was also never emphasized, never shared in a way that I would have been able to name as particularly Jewish. This essential Jewish practice was spontaneous, spoken prayer. When one thinks about the concept of prayer in Judaism, the mind usually goes to one place: sitting in the pews of the synagogue, praying one of our many set, daily services out of the siddur (prayer book). Yet this is not the only kind of prayer we have in Judaism. Prayer is a sacred practice that is meant to chisel at our roughened souls; it is meant to have an impact on us and on God, as it were. And therefore a practice of imbuing prayer with meaning is critical to a healthy spiritual life. This means having a personal relationship – one where “I and Thou,” as Martin Buber puts it, can spend time just chatting.
While I knew I could always talk to Hashem (God), I only learned about it as a practice much later in life, probably during the time I spent on my gap year in Yeshiva. (What a robust religious world I enjoyed!) This practice is not well-known or widely practiced throughout our Jewish world.
Over the past year and a half, I have become particularly intrigued by the practice of Hitbodedut as part of some educational work I have been doing guiding others in this practice. Hitbodedut is the Hasidic approach to spontaneous prayer, in which you go somewhere you can be isolated and have a one-on-one prayer with God. Rebbe Nachman, a great Hasidic sage, recommended taking on this practice for an hour every day. Working as a leader at Lech Lecha Journeys, a Jewish backpacking group, it was an essential part of the prayer practice on any of our camping trips. We would hike into the woods, get ready for Shabbat, and, after the traditional set prayer, we offered intentional space for meditation or spoken prayer for our participants. We would each find a place to be alone in nature and just connect with God; to say whatever we would like.
I have always had a spiritual side and a deep contemplative relationship with God. My prayers have been frequently embedded with my own personal experiences and anecdotes. I have been taught that “the soul is in a constant state of prayer” (Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook), and that I ought to be trying to tap into that. But I didn’t really engage in a Hitbodedut practice until I had an opportunity to do it with others. It’s funny how teaching this practice is really what brought me to it.
After my first summer trip-leading, I decided to spend some time learning about this practice. When I did, I noticed something I must have forgotten: it’s right there in our earliest texts. This is the original way of prayer. This is the prayer of the Torah, of Moses, of Abraham at Sodom, of Isaac in the field, and of Jacob wrestling with his angel, of Hannah – the matriarch of Jewish prayer – begging God to help her birth a child. It’s not only Biblical; spontaneous prayer is, in fact, embedded within the DNA of what our prayer is today. I usually reverted to the idea that to fulfill my obligation to pray I needed to pray the standard text of the prayer book. But I’ve been reminded again of the notion that any time we speak to God (of course!) it fulfills an essential aspect of our obligation to pray. We have done a “mitzvah” even when we pray spontaneously. Authentic prayer comes from the heart. As the Talmud says, “the Compassionate One desires the heart.” Why did I forget this?
There’s an old Hasidic tale of a child who could not read yet comes to the prayer service on Yom Kippur. While everyone is praying, the child begins to play the flute. The others in the synagogue turn around and give him dirty looks. The young boy, embarrassed, runs out of the service. Later that day, the rabbi gets up to speak and says, “Only one prayer was truly accepted today, that of the child playing the flute.” The child’s prayer was accompanied by such intense enthusiasm that it achieved the highest spirituality, despite the unorthodox mode. I think that when prayer comes from our heart, those of us living in resonance with that depth might notice it too.
I was consulted by my partner recently about a Hebrew School prayer curriculum. “Raffi – we’re redoing the prayer curriculum at our school. What do you think we should do?” she asked me. “Did you add a section on spontaneous prayer?” I asked. “Not yet, should we?” “Definitely.”
I think we’re really missing the voice of spontaneous prayer in Jewish life. We’ve forgotten that prayer has this additional component. It is not just about reading words out of a book, but pouring out our hearts to God. And what more accessible tool is there than just praying in our own words – with our own language?
We’d be doing a major disservice to the next generation by not passing on this essential tradition. Giving people the opportunity to speak from the heart, to say what’s on their mind, to meditate and connect with the Beyond Within. It helps us bring our true purpose out and share who we truly are with the world.
I have found this practice to be a huge blessing for me. In my life, making space to speak with God or just to reflect to myself in that conversation, these are ways to embed deep meaning into the prayer experience. I love the chance to make space for an authentic relationship through prayer, one that uses my own words to connect me to God on a personal level, alongside those Hebrew words that connect me to my people and our collective connection to God. I love to be able to ask God about my theological qualms with this whole thing we’re doing, to share my personal struggles, talk about my desire to grow spiritually and relationally in my life, count all the things I am grateful for, and even crack open about the things that totally infuriate me. I believe we can bring our fullest selves to prayer this way. And maybe this way, God can bring God’s fullest Self into our lives, too.
As we soon arrive at the High Holidays, perhaps you’ll take some time to speak from the heart. Maybe do it Hitbodedut style: take time outside of the synagogue setting for a bit, to go somewhere where you can be one-on-one with yourself and/or God. Take a break to really reflect, to connect to that core part of you, and to create a vessel for personal meaning, reconnecting to this primordial Jewish practice of spontaneous prayer.