We are entering the season of words, huge numbers of words, hours and hours of words. Rosh Hahanah and Yom Kippur are filled with prayer words. And modern man/woman is not a praying person! But this is the season of conversation with God, the season of T’fillot (prayers). To recite the prayers in the Siddur {prayer book) is to talk with the one God, to know that God hears our conversation with Him in much the same way that our friends and loved ones hear us. These are the hard hours of Jewish life.
The Haftara (Prophetic reading) for the first day of Rosh Hahanah is the narrative of Hannah, mother of Samuel. There are some 90 or so spontaneous prayers spoken by individuals to God in TaNaKh (the Bible). Among the critical praying figures of TaNaKh are of course Moses, David, and Daniel. Yet when the rabbis of the Talmud present us with a praying model for the Days of Awe, they could find no figure more suitable than Hannah. She is married to Elkana, but is childless, and bitter that God has closed her womb. From the depths of her heart and the bitterness of her being she prays to God for a child:
And her very life was so bitter; and she had an intimate conversation with God in which she cried and wept. She took a vow and she said to God, ‘If You will but take note of the torment of Your servant and remember me and not forget Your servant, and give to Your servant a son, then I will give that child back to God for all the days of his life.’ And it was as her prayer grew and increased that Eli the High Priest was carefully watching her lips. Hannah was speaking out of her heart, her lips were moving, but her voice was not heard; and Eli took her to be a drunkard. (I Samuel 1)
Imagine that! In ancient times comes a woman, crosses the threshold of the Mishkan (Tabernacle) in Shiloh, takes her stand in the holiest place of all Israel, on the verso side of the Holy of Holies, pours out her tormented soul and her bitter speech before God, and the High Priest thinks she is drunk. Prayer is so difficult that even the High Priest is skeptical when he sees it.
The Talmud studies Hannah to set forth the practices of T’fillah. Rav Hamnuna said, “Look how many powerful ways of prayer we learn from Hannah!”
From Hannah we learn the one idea without which prayer remains mere chatter. “Hannah spoke from her heart.” Prayer must come from the heart with informed, willed, intentional focus. This of course is the most difficult of all, to focus when the One with whom you are talking cannot be seen, heard, or felt. The hardest thing that a Jew has to do, is to focus on conversation with the Kadosh Barukh Hu, the one God.
What is it that makes Hannah the praying person of TaNaKh? Hannah does not come before God with trivial prayers. She comes before God seeking life itself. She has special standing as a woman. The moment creation ends, God’s first instruction to human beings is to create life, to continue to do what God did for six days. God’s partner in the creation of life, is woman. This knowledge that she is God’s fullest partner gives Hannah the standing and the fortitude to do what she does. She, a woman from the countryside, comes to the central place of worship in Israel. Throngs have come here at the same time to celebrate great holidays. Despite the distractions, Hannah, with utter focus, talks with God at the Mishkan itself. In the midst of all Israel, and at the spiritual capital of Israel, she knows that she and God are utterly alone with each other.
She is so absorbed in her conversation with God that she appears to the High Priest as a drunkard. Now she wasn’t slurred in her speech, because her speech couldn’t be heard. She wasn’t wobbling as she walked. She was utterly still and alone with God. Why did the High Priest think that she was a drunkard? She was doing something quite odd. She was behaving like someone who was having a conversation with another person and apparently there was no other person standing there. That is T’fillah. For a Jew to talk with God, who cannot be seen, as if they were standing and talking with another person and having simple, whispered conversation, is to be a prayerful person. Hannah pours forth her words to God. She empties herself and in so doing makes a gift of herself to God. It is in this aloneness with God that prayer happens.
It is compelling that when the rabbis present us with a model of a praying person they don’t offer one of the better-known, more dominant figures of TaNaKh. Perhaps therein is the message. None of us are, or can ever hope to be Moses, David, Elijah, or Isaiah. But the circumstance of Hannah is our common, human circumstance. She is like us, a person in a difficult situation, facing a complex family problem; a husband who loves her but doesn’t fully understand her; denied the greatest dream of her life; possessed of no prior career with God, or specialization in faith, worship, let alone theology; who turns, out of the depths of her being and torment, to the one God and says, “Please help”; and does so in direct conversation with God.
Humans as thinking animals regularly seek to transcend themselves, to reach beyond the animal self. The human is both social animal and praying animal; prayer has always been as natural as family and community formation. Hannah is presented to us for our Rosh Hashanah consideration based on the enduring conviction of the rabbis that even in our time of skepticism, it may still be possible for humans to be like Hannah, to transcend time and place and turn, in the aloneness of being, and from there to seek the One.
The words of prayer are not just prayers, they are great literature, the belles-lettres of the Jewish people. One of the features of great literature is that it transports a person to other times and places. The most familiar of all of our prayers are nearly 2,000 years old. They have endured because they transport us.
This year, when you open this old-new prayer book of ours and begin to read its vast number of words, begin with the possibility that this is literature. While reading this literature, encounter the ideas, and possibly, in the encounter with the ideas will come the enchantment of being transported to the simple, common place of Hannah, a woman who with her simple words, taught us the naturalness of prayer.
Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko is Judaic Scholar at the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.
