Prayer and Patience (Parshat Re'eh)

Here is the sermon that I gave at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn last night. It deals with a legal issue that came up during the daf yomi cycle a few months ago:


Every once and a while, you meet a student who makes you question everything you thought you knew. Mine came during the summer between my junior and senior year in college.

It had been my tenth summer at the URJ Eisner Camp in the Berkshires. During this summer, my job was to act both as counselor to a group of ten graders and to coordinate and lead t’fillah and song sessions for them.

One night, our group watched scenes from the movie Dogma and met afterward to discuss the theological questions that came up from the movie. You know the basic stuff that friends chat about over a drink: free will, theodicy (why bad things happen), and the existence of God. During this talk, one student emphatically stated that she got nothing out of prayer. Turning to me she asked accusingly, “do you ever actually feel anything when you lead prayer?”

I froze because I knew the answer that I had to give. Not really. I made some excuse about how when I lead prayers, I had to worry about keys and guitar chords and that took away from my experience, but the truth was I had sat through plenty of services where I felt nothing. In fact, I could only count a handful of times when I had really ever felt something.

For the rest of the summer, I questioned myself every time I left services untransformed. I might be doing something wrong. Why spend so much time in prayer when so much of it feels rote? Why don’t I walk away a different person for having prayed?

In fact, it was wrestling with these questions that kept from applying to Rabbinical school in my senior year in college.

It’s taken me many years to realize that there was nothing wrong with me or my connection to Judaism. I simply wasn’t willing to give the tradition the time that it needed. I was impatient and wanted to have a transformative experience every time I opened my mouth in prayer, every time studied a little Torah, and every time I drank the Shabbat wine. I failed to see that these expectations were unrealistic. In fact, these expectations were antithetical to a lot of what the rabbis teach us about Jewish practice. Judaism is a religion only experienced through patience.

I want to give one example of the centrality of patience that appears in this week’s Torah portion, but to do so I have to make a short diversion. In this week’s portion we have a description of the Ir Hanididachat (the apostate city). The law of this city is simple. If as all the inhabitants of a city renounce God and begin to practice idolatry, their city should be destroyed. The Torah explains that one should make a bon fire in the middle of town and the whole city should go up in flames like Sodom and Gemorah.

Hundreds of years later, the Rabbis looked at this passage with the same discomfort that I imagine we are feeling today. However, the Rabbis were not willing to throw out the law. Instead, they re-imagined it. The rabbis understood that the only way a city could be considered an ir hanidachat is if it was first a practicing Jewish city that turned to idolatry. What does it mean to be a practicing Jewish city? That it has Torah scroll, Mezuzot, and prayerbooks.

Turning their attention to the line in the Torah that tells us to build a bon fire and burn everything, the rabbis ask: are we really allowed to burn everything in the city? Even the Torahs? Even the Mezuzot?

Therefore, the Rabbis made a rule: as long as there is at least one Mezuzah in the city we can’t fulfill the commandment to burn everything in the city (because we may not burn a mezuzah). A city with at least one mezuzah cannot be called an ir hanidachat and must be saved.

And since the Rabbis can’t imagine a practicing Jewish city without at least one Mezuzah they are forced to say: never has there been and never will there be an ir hanidachat.

Here we have ingenious solution to a troubling passage. However, there is one problem: if the idea of the ir hanidachat is irrelevant, why bother studying it? Why should we spend time studying anything that has no practical significance for us? Shouldn’t we walk away from every study session with some insight that will make us better Jews, better friends, better people?

The Rabbis have one answer, I have another. The Rabbis explain that one should study it because study itself it a mitzvoth (a commandment) and doing commandments, no matter their practicality) earn one a place in the world to come.

I want to add may own thoughts to this discussion. The reason we study about the ir hanidachat is because it helps teach us patience. Growing up, I had a neighbor whose hobby it was to make Nantucket baskets, those finely woven wicker baskets that sell for way too much in New England. This neighbor used to spend hours and hours, patiently weaving one strip of material in and out of another. If she thought that each moment was going to be an enlightening experience, she would have been very disappointed. The work was tedious. However, she knew that at some undetermined point she would be finished and her basket would be complete.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explains that Jewish practices (like prayer and study) function in the same way to my neighbor’s baskets. Each time we pray, each time we study, each time we choose to eat Kosher food, we patiently weave under and over each stave of our basket. And when we are finished (and it might take day, months, or even years) we have made ourselves into a vessel, a container. Sacks goes on to explain that when God wants to give us blessings, God doesn’t put them on a platter in front of us, rather God throws them into the wind and allows us to gather them ourselves. Only with a basket can we catch God’s blessings. And only by prayer, study and other Jewish practices can we make this vessel.

Just as Nantucket baskets don’t last forever, so too our vessels don’t last forever. That’s because we has humans are always changing. And when we do, we must go through the patient process of weaving another basket.

Prayer isn’t supposed to connect us to God. Study shouldn’t make us enlightened. Rather each time we study, we move one step closer to creating our vessel, and basket in hand, begin to connect to God and begin to reach enlightenment. That’s why we study impractical sections like the laws of the ir handichat. These laws are just as good as any other for patiently weaving our basket.

Religion, like most things in life takes patience, and sometimes we might question why we do certain things. However, if it’s done with care, love, and foresight we walk away from our encounter just a little different, having woven one more piece of our baskets. Like water on a rock often this change cannot be seen immediately. But trusting that it will, is the essence of faith.