Leaping hurdles to gain meaningful prayer
By Michele Alperin
Feb. 29, 08

A mathematics professor at Rutgers University may not be the most likely author of a new siddur, but Joe Rosenstein of Highland Park came to this project with an abiding connection to Judaism and a pragmatism that may reflect his academic leanings. His approach in Siddur Eit Ratzon is to help people overcome obstacles they may face when trying to pray -- by offering meaningful translations, notes and comments, meditations, and transliterations.

Rosenstein talked about prayer and his new siddur to a crowd of 60 at the Highland Park Conservative Temple on Feb. 19; his presentation was titled "Positioning Ourselves for Meaningful Prayer."

Jews come to services on Shabbat for a variety of reasons, said Rosenstein -- to hear a sermon, to attend a family celebration, to enjoy being part of a community, to say Kaddish, among others -- but few come because they want to daven, to pray.

One reason many are turned off, suggested Rosenstein, has to do with how prayers are created. Prayers are usually renderings of an immediate and intense spiritual experience that the prayer’s writer wanted to share. But once that prayer is locked into a siddur, it may eventually lose its potency, leaving its audience unable to access the insight that inspired it.

Rosenstein offers the example of the words at the close of the Sh’ma, "Adonai Eloheichem -- Adonai is your God," followed by the words "emet, v’yatziv," which begin a list of 16 adjectives.

Rosenstein interprets the adjectives, which some might label as "boring," as expressing the amazement of the prayer’s writer at the fact that the creator of the universe is our personal God. Here is how Rosenstein begins his translation of this prayer:

Adonai is your God ... and that is true!

Wow! This teaching is so

amazing,

I cannot find enough words to describe it.

It is definitely true and always will be.

Rosenstein suggests several types of obstacles that moderns encounter when trying to pray.

The first has to do with the nature of prayer. Most people think of prayer as petitions to God for help. "In the popular mind, prayer works," he said, "or at least most people think it does." Rosenstein jokes that he even sees this in his students, when they pray to get good grades on their exams. But, more seriously, he sees a serious obstacle between a culture that sees prayer as petitions that God answers and a God who did not answer people’s prayers for help during the Holocaust. This is a theological-philosophical obstacle to prayer.

Another obstacle to meaningful prayer has to do with uncomfortable content. A person may not, for example, believe in the resurrection of the dead, which is alluded to in the second blessing of the Amidah, the central prayer in every Jewish service.

To validate these kinds of concerns, Rosenstein deals openly with them in his siddur. On the issue of whether God responds to petitionary prayer, for example, he is straightforward in his belief that "God does not micromanage the universe."

Rosenstein presents prayer, therefore, as a way to recognize the blessings in our lives rather than as a petition to God for human needs. He quoted a passage from his siddur, "We could of course focus on all the things that go wrong, but if we focus instead on what goes right, we come to realize that we have many blessings, and that God is their source. An important prerequisite to prayer is an awareness of all that God provides.... Life, health, strength, courage, faith, security, caring, love, compassion, forgiveness, and many more blessings are God’s daily bounty."

Language also can get in the way -- prayers may seem boring, repetitive, obtuse, or archaic, or they may talk about God in problematic ways. And for people who can’t read Hebrew, a good transliteration and accessible translation of all the prayers is essential.

The last potential obstacle is the absence of the information needed to understand a service. Rosenstein likened confused worshipers to the crowds at the Rochester Red Wings Triple-A baseball stadium where as a vendor he used to shout, "You can’t tell the players without a scorecard." So now he faces helpless worshipers -- who don’t know what is going on globally or locally in the service -- and tells them, "You can’t tell the prayers without a scorecard."

And that’s what Rosenstein has tried to do in his siddur -- provide a "scorecard" that elucidates the spiritual journey through the different parts of the service, the meanings of individual prayers, the movement choreography, and "translations and comments that try to capture the prayers in language that makes sense to the contemporary reader."

Rosenstein was born in England after his parents finally managed to escape from the city-state Danzig the day before Hitler invaded. It was their fourth attempt to leave -- having already been sent back twice from Palestine and once from Sweden.

In 1948, when Rosenstein was eight, the family moved to Rochester, New York, where they had some relatives; the rest, as far as they knew, had been killed during the war.

Rosenstein’s mother came from a religious family and his father from one not so religious, but both were active in Jewish organizations of all sorts -- from the New Americans Club, Pioneer Women, and Labor Zionist organizations to the Yiddish Kultur Council and the Chug Ivri. Both of his parents studied Hebrew by correspondence and got certificates from the Hebrew University attesting to their ability to speak Hebrew.

Rosenstein and his sister had very different types of Jewish education. He was one of three students learning with a rebbe in his 80s who had once had a large cheder, and his sister attended the secularist Peretz Folkschule.

While Rosenstein was at Columbia University, he attended courses several evenings a week at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and subsequently he did a lot of Jewish text study b’chevruta, in pairs or triples.

For many years he has taught courses on all manner of Jewish topics, including prayer, at the Highland Park Conservative Temple-Anshe Emeth and at havurah institutes and retreats. Through his teaching as well as guided meditations he began to write to enhance understanding of particular prayers, Rosenstein began to really understand what was in the siddur. "It is hard to do that if you just go in for a service and spend an hour flying through the book," he observed. "I discovered that the authors of the siddur had amazing spiritual insights and if we understood them, we would be the better for it."

But why write a siddur? Rosenstein knew about the Jewish tradition of writing a Torah at age 50, but not being a sofer, or scribe, Rosenstein decided to try his hand at a siddur. At that time, in 2000, the Highland Park Minyan, where Rosenstein prays, was looking forward to the bat mitzvah of Miriam Dorman Langer, and he offered to try to put together a siddur for the occasion.

The enthusiastic responses he got spurred him through five revisions, and now his siddur is being used in over 30 different congregations. About a dozen or fifteen Conservative, Reconstructionist, and unaffiliated congregations have adopted it as their primary siddur. Others use it for learners’ services; synaplex, where several services are going on at the same time; and for education programs.

Attendees at the lecture asked a number of challenging questions, some theological in tone. One person asked whether Rosenstein was positing a form of dualism with his assumption that God is powerless in the face of evil but is at the same time the source of our blessings. Rosenstein said he believes that inherent in the blessings God provides are bad things like death and sickness. "It is the way the world is constructed," he said. "The world is a complicated place; you can focus on all the bad things that can happen; but the blessings are all around us and we can focus on them."

Another person asked how it is possible to pray meaningfully at a very fast-moving morning minyan. First Rosenstein observed sympathetically, "If a service is an express train, it’s hard to make it meaningful." Then he offered some suggestions: reading only every other paragraph or focusing on one word or phrase in a paragraph. "Just because everyone else on an express train doesn’t mean I have to be -- at least not all the time," he explains. "I’m part of a community whose goal is to end at 7:30 [a.m.], because people have to go to work, but spirituality demands that I say the prayers with a certain amount of kavanah."

Rabbi Malamut asked Rosenstein to reflect on being a liturgist, on how exhilarating and difficult it is to compose a prayer. "What makes something work or not work?" he asked. "Why is it that some siddurim coming out have no shelf life and expire the second they are published?"

One issue is currency, said Rosenstein. If prayers are too current or refer to current events, they can quickly lose their power as times change.

"Most people learn to pray superficially," Rosenstein said, "and probably don’t advance far from there because there is no impetus for them to do that." Probably most Jews, and this is true across the spectrum, he said, learn how to read and recite prayers at best and may recognize a few phrases here and there.

For him, it was creating this siddur that made all the difference. "One thing translating a siddur forced me to do was to deal with every word, every phrase and realize ‘Oh, that’s what that means,’ and ‘Oh, that is connected to that.’"

Rosenstein offers his siddur as a compendium of the spiritual messages he has learned. "Realizing that most people are not aware of them," he said, "what I tried was to make it more possible for people to catch those messages."

For more information about Siddur Eit Ratzon, go to www.newsiddur.org.