What is prayer for?
Abraham Joshua Heschel, On Prayer
Prayer serves many aims. It serves to save the inward life from oblivion. It serves to alleviate anguish. It serves to partake of God’s mysterious grace and guidance. Yet, ultimately, prayer must not be experienced as an act for the sake of something else. We pray in order to pray.
Prayer is a perspective from which to behold, from which to respond to, the challenges we face. Man in prayer does not seek to impose his will upon God; he seeks to impose God’s will and mercy upon himself. Prayer is necessary to make us aware of our failures, backsliding, transgressions, sins....
Though often I do not know how to pray, I can still say: Redeem me from the agony of not knowing what to strive for, from the agony of not knowing how my inner life is falling apart...I pray because I am unable to pray.
Mordecai Kaplan The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion
The presence of the multitude in public worship creates an atmosphere that profoundly influences the individual participant. It stirs in him emotions of gratitude that he could not experience in isolation. He knows his life to be part of a larger life, a wave of an ocean of being. This is the first-hand experience of the larger life which is God.
Harold Schulweis
In prayer you pray to move God. But the way you move God is through moving the divine in yourself...the purpose of prayer is to activate the godly in and between ourselves. To put it more bluntly, we cannot pray for anything that doesn't call on us to do something whether it's in terms of our attitude, our will, our energy or our intelligence. You can't pray for health however earnestly by expecting God to say yes or no. To pray for health means that you take seriously the means and meaning of health. You can't properly pray to God for health with a cigarette in your mouth ...You cannot pray for peace and do nothing about it. You cannot pray that God should love the Jewish people without expressing your love for the Jewish people.
Joseph Soloveitchik, Lonely Man of Faith
Prayer is basically an awareness of man finding himself in the presence of and addressing himself to his Maker, and to pray has one connotation only: to stand before God. To be sure, this awareness has been objectified and crystallized in standardized, definitive texts whose recitation is obligatory... the very essence of prayer is the covenantal experience of being together with and talking to God and that the concrete performance such as the recitation of texts represents the technique of implementation of prayer and not prayer itself...
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Religious Praxis
The prayerbook, which determines the context of the Mitzvah of prayer, does not express the spontaneous outpouring of the soul. It contains a text of fixed prayer, imposed upon one as a duty and not conditioned by his spiritual or material needs or by his feeling. The same eighteen benedictions are recited by the bridegroom before his wedding ceremony, by the widower returning from the funeral of his wife, and the father who has just buried his only son. Recitation of the identical set of psalms is the daily duty of the person enjoying the beauties and bounty of this world and the one whose world has collapsed. The same order of supplications is prescribed for those who feel the need for them and those who do not.
What is a prayer book for?
Rabbi Eliezer says: One whose prayer is fixed, his prayer is not supplication.
What is the meaning of "fixed"?
Rabbi Ya’akov bar Idi said that Rabbi Oshaya said: It means anyone for whom their prayer is like a burden upon them.
The Rabbis say: This refers to anyone who does not recite prayer in the language of supplication.
Rabba and Rav Yosef both said: It refers to anyone unable to introduce a novel element,
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man's Quest for God
How grateful I am to God that there is a duty to worship, a law to remind my distraught mind that it is time to think of God, time to disregard my ego for at least a moment! It is such happiness to belong to an order of the divine will. I am not always in a mood to pray. I do not always have the vision and the strength to say a word in the presence of God. But when I am weak, it is the law that gives me strength; when my vision is dim, it is duty that gives me insight
Abraham Joshua Heschel, On Prayer
In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages, due to the scarcity of parchment, people would often write new texts on top of earlier written parchments. The term denoting such writings is palimpsest. Metaphorically, I suggest that authentic theology is a palimpsest: scholarly, disciplined thinking grafted upon prayer.