The earliest recorded forms of Jewish worship are to be found
in the Bible — formal sacrifices recognising the thanksgiving
due to God either for His bounty or simply His forbearance and
spontaneous songs of praise such as those sung by Moses and Miriam
on the shores of the Red Sea after the destruction of the pursuing
Egyptian army. Slightly less obviously, the rabbis point out that,
for example, Isaac ‘meditated in the fields’ and from this deduce
that the business of regular prayer is as old as the Jewish People
itself. The first recorded forms of regular and prescribed worship
of the conventional kind were the sacrifices and other rituals
set down in the Torah. Jews have come a long way since it was
easy for a relatively homogeneous community to focus its process
of worship in one place and maintain a priestly class to do most
of the work for them. As we shall see however part of the process
is still focussed on the same place, if not in it, but the spreading
out of the community has resulted in much more democratic and
widespread responsibility for the worshipping life of the Jew.
It is possibly no truer of Judaism than of other religions that
to look only at prayers, services and liturgy when discussing
worship is to investigate perhaps the least interesting and certainly
the least pervasive form of worship in the life of Jews. However,
for the record, we’ll start with them. Jewish prayer, as a rule,
is set. The formal services leave little room for extempore prayer
except at those points when the set prayers are said silently
and the individual is on his/her own.
The original forms of daily sacrifice — contrary to popular imagination,
mostly meal, oil and incense, or if an animal, the majority was
eaten — were discon- tinued with the destruction of the Temple
in Jerusalem in 7OCE. Already though, the synagogue was a fully
formed centre for learning, meeting and prayer and it took up
the slack very effectively. The daily services, morning, afternoon
and evening, reflect the daily sacrifices, and the festival and
Shabbat additional sacrifice is mirrored by an additional service.
In this way these very physical sacrifices were transmuted into
the text of prayer.
Prominent in these services are the Shema, morning and evening,
which proclaims the oneness of God, our responsibility to love
God and observe His Torah; the Amida, a standing prayer consisting
of a number of supplications and blessings on weekdays, and praises
on Shabbat and festivals; and Aleynu, a prayer which proclaims
our duty to serve God and dreams of the messianic age when all
shall be well with the world.
These prayers, in Hebrew, are more or less unchanged from the
time of the destruction of the Temple and spend considerably more
time addressing the sayer than God. The most important of them
is said facing towards Jerusalem, wherever one may be in the world
and so, although Jews have been dispersed from their centre, they
have never allowed Jerusalem to be less than central in their
prayers. A central feature of Shabbat and festival services is
the reading from the Torah. The festival readings are chosen for
their relevance to the occasion while the Shabbat readings work
through the whole Torah on an annual cycle.
The reader reads (or chants) from a Torah scroll — handwritten
with quill in ink on parchment (all kosher materials) — while
the congregation follows from printed books. It is not uncommon,
if the reader makes a mistake, for the congregation to call out
and correct them, since the Word is more important than the person
— who would anyway prefer to get it right. The taking out of the
scroll from the Ark, its parading through the congregation, the
holding up of it open to show the whole congregation what is being
read, and its procession back to the Ark after the reading provide
the main point of ceremony - and even pomp - in most synagogue
services.
In terms of reverencing things, the sacred objects are those
that contain the Name of God. Scrolls of Torah, mezuzot, and t’fillin
are particularly cared for not least because such care went into
their making, but printed prayerbooks and the like are equally
deserving of respect. It is said that one should fast for a day
if one drops one’s t’fillin, for example, and if one’s prayerbook
is dropped, it is customary to pick it up and kiss it. I remember
as a boy being genuinely shocked at the way my school friends
threw their hymnbooks into their desks after assembly. With the
increasing squeeze on money for textbooks, it might be no bad
thing to linger with a class over this particular aspect of Jewish
reverence!
The atmosphere in a synagogue is a relatively relaxed and informal
one. As one moves more and more across the spectrum of orthodoxy,
the atmosphere becomes increasingly informal so that in a very
orthodox synagogue people will be coming and going, children will
be running about and the hubbub of conversation could sometimes
well nigh drown the leader of the service. That individual need
not be a rabbi but can be any member of the congregation with
the knowledge and the voice to make a stab at the traditional
chants and melodies.
It is common for Jews to rock or sway as they say prayers and
even during silent prayer the words may well be said aloud! This
means that there is hardly ever a sense of stillness in a synagogue
service and silence or peace is also hard to come by. The origin
of such movement and noise is in the idea that saying prayers
should not just be a cerebral thing but should involve the whole
self. The result is that there is a curious privacy in the midst
of it, because there seems to be no pressure or selfconsciousness
because everyone else is so obviously involved in their own thing.
It is not uncharacteristic of Jews to make even their communal
activities contexts for individualism!
If worship is the recognition, praise and celebration of God
in our lives, then for Jews a much more important forum for worship,
however, is the home. Anyone who has considered the technical
care that goes into preparing a kosher meal — ultimately only
because it is an act of obedience — will see what a significant
act of worship any ordinary meal must be. When one must not only
vet the ingredients but also avoid the mixing of milk and meat,
select the utensils and crockery accordingly, and so on, the business
of recognising God in life becomes a very domestic and inescapable
thing.
If that is true for any ordinary meal, how much more true is
it of a festival or Shabbat meal. Interestingly, one of the requirements
for Shabbat is the eating of three meals — two with their accompanying
Kiddush over a cup of wine — the lengthy sung Grace After Meals
and the table songs that intersperse the courses, and even the
uninitiated observer would realise that they were present at the
very heart of a vibrant tradition that is reaching beyond the
merely physical and gastronomic.
It is no coincidence that many of the most famous and lasting
features of Jewish family life are the significant meals. The
Purim seuda (feast), the meal that starts and breaks the fast
on Yom Kippur, the Friday evening meal and, of course, the famous
Passover Seder are all examples of these memorable but regular
meals of significance. All Jewish celebratory meals are social
gatherings at which one of the main purposes is to have something
to eat! The overtly religious parts are interspersed so that the
whole process becomes an act of worship and eating is an act of
acceptance of the bounty of God.
The Pesach Seder is a happy, family event. The extensive liturgy
uses songs, symbolic foods, discus- sions, tongue-twisters, games
and questions to deliver its message of the never-ending reality
of the Exodus from Egypt. At the heart of the evening is a meal,
perhaps the simplest and most natural demonstration that the Jews
are a free people, but it is also an opportunity for family to
pick up old news, for cousins to play together, for the generations
to gather, for the little ones to stay up late and so on. The
very fact of doing all this is a celebration of the continued
existence of this family, which is basically what Pesach is about.
Meals and food are also significant at rites of passage. The
wedding feast includes the seven blessings for the bride and groom
said over a celebratory pair of goblets of wine, the contents
of which are mixed before both of the partners drink. One of the
essential requirements of a Brit Mila (a circumcision) is a ‘seuda
mitzva’, a meal to celebrate fulfilling a commandment, and one
of the first things that mourners do on returning from a funeral
is to eat some prescribed foods which will focus their minds on
mortality and God’s creation.
But it is not only the home and the synagogue which are foci
for worship for the Jew. Firstly, of course, the daily services
can be said anywhere at the appropriate time. Even when one is
out on a picnic the laws of kashrut apply. The separation of milk
and meat foods and the customary time allowed to lapse between
eating one and the other means that if you have sausages for lunch
at one o’clock, you would have to decline the offer of a piece
of chocolate at three o’clock, drink only lemon tea or black coffee
at your half past three break or wait till four o’clock by which
time the three hours will have elapsed. It only needs a little
reflection to realise that we hardly ever go three hours during
our waking life without eating or drinking something and so we
have to be constantly aware of the requirements of kashrut.
Another of the most pervasive traditions of Jewish worship is
that of saying blessings. These are formula statements that always
start with the words “You are blessed, O Lord our God, King of
the Universe, who . . .“ There are blessings for eating fruit,
vegetables, cake, bread, fish, etc., for smelling flowers, for
seeing the sea, a rainbow, mountains, arriving safely, hearing
good news, hearing bad news, washing your hands, meeting someone
important, getting up in the morning, lighting Shabbat candles,
putting on the tallit, t’filin, fixing a mezuza — you name it,
there is probably a blessing to praise God for it!
The rabbis in the Talmud recommended that one should try to say
a hundred blessings a day. This appears like a very tall order
indeed until you realise the subtlety of detail that they wished
you to rejoice in and celebrate. Not for them a mere blanket blessing
for a meal as a whole but rejoice in the vegetables, the soup,
the cup of tea, notice each little detail. It is an intriguing
challenge to count a hundred blessings in an ordinary day, not
just the red letter ones. The spiritual discipline required to
say something positive about every experience, even the bad ones,
is considerable but produces its own reward.
The nature of the Jewish year involves another less tangible
form of worship. The Jewish day starts at sunset. The Jewish month
starts with a new moon. The festivals are often associated with
agricultural events and some are explicitly and exclusively associated
with the world of nature — for example, the New Year for trees.
It is often forgotten that the three pilgrim festivals of Pesach,
Shavuot and Sukkot are all harvest festivals, marking a fact not
commonly realised outside the countryside that there are many
harvests in a year for different kinds of produce. Thus Judaism
forces us to remember the natural order of the world.
The impact of this is considerable and increasing. As we move
towards an increasingly urban and technological society, people
could well be forgiven for forgetting that our presence in this
world is a relatively precarious one and, whoever the retailer
of our material comforts, the ultimate wholesaler is God. Children
in our big cities are often not aware of the agricultural source
of our food and both children and adults forget in central heating
that people can die of cold or that sunset comes at different
times during the year. Some are never prompted to look up at the
sky and few now can remember when the season for apples or cucumber
is. We cut down trees with cavalier indifference and set no time
aside for replanting, and so on. Not so in the Jewish scheme of
things. Necessarily, one watches the sun and the moon, notes the
seasons. In the Sukka we discover how we cope without proper shelter
and heating, on Yom Kippur we learn how to cope without food,
on Tu B’Shevat we plant trees and we are always seeking out seasonal
fruit to say the blessing on first fruit of the season.
As a child I was always asking how things grew so that I would
know which blessing to say on the food in question — is it the
blessing for things that grow in the ground or on trees? I still
often glance up if I’m in a strange place to see which way the
sun is shining— east tells you where Jerusalem is and, therefore,
which direction to pray towards — when on holiday without a local
Jewish calendar I watch on Thursday evening to see when the sun
sets — that way I’ll know what time Shabbat will start the following
evening, the prohibition on travelling on Shabbat means that I,
a car owner, still have to notice the weather for at least one
in seven days, the announcement of a new month in synagogue makes
me glance into the sky and notice the new moon each month, the
laws of kashrut make me notice when food has been treated so that
it is not as pure or natural as it seems — notice the gelatine
in most yoghourts now only because the pots are too weak to stand
up for themselves! — and so on.
It is, of course, true that for the truly spiritual person all
this comes naturally, but few of us can claim to be such exalted
beings. For most of us, the ordinary things of life preoccupy
us and it is difficult to find time for the cosmic. This formula
approach at least helps the ordinary person not to forget the
extraordinary.
For the teachers reading this article, the features of worship
described above give many opportunities for experimentation in
the classroom and access to the tradition without the often unproductive
activity of ploughing through someone else’s intimate words coldly
in order to find out what they really mean.
A model Seder is an always successful session. The children have
an opportunity to join in, preferably with the preparations as
well, it is constructed as an educational experience and, provided
it is kept jolly, it is accessible to children in schools from
about age nine through to sixth form (not to mention teachers
and parents). A good abridged English version, with instructions,
recipes and songs, designed to take about an hour, is available
from the Board of Deputies.
Tu B’Shevat in January or February gives a marvellous opportunity
to focus on trees. The custom of trying to eat fifteen different
kinds of fruit from trees (preferably from Israel) gives many
cross-curricular opportunities. (The reason for fifteen is that
the festival falls on the fifteenth of the month, Shevat.) Discovering
what grows on trees, what grows in Israel and trying to do the
same about other countries in the world is both fascinating and
enjoyable. The JNF (Jewish National Fund) provide attractive material
on the agriculture of Israel.
The challenge to say one hundred blessings a day appeals particularly
to that age-group that loves lists — the middle school child.
It is a very effective way of slowing down their perception and
experience of the world and encouraging their appreciation of
it. Finding one hundred things to be grateful for (even if one
does not want to be theistic about it) is a very constructive
exercise for a child — and it has its different benefits whether
the child’s life is deprived or affluent.
Without doubt there is good co-operation to be had with the CDT
department in the building of a Sukka that will stand up for the
duration of Sukkot in the sometimes inclement and blowy weather
of October.
There is obviously work to be done with the Home Economics department
as with the Science Department. Try working out ways in which
a hospital in Israel (which obviously is required to break the
laws of the Shabbat to save life) can introduce systems to keep
those infringements to the minimum. There is History, Geography,
Art, Music, indeed pretty well the whole National Curriculum here
before one even starts on Religious Education! |