Praying in the Depths

צוּר יִשְׂרָאֵל קֽוּמָה בְּעֶזְרַת יִשְׂרָאֵל וּפְדֵה כִנְאֻמֶֽךָ יְהוּדָה וְיִשְׂרָאֵל

Rock of Israel, arise to the aid of Israel, and liberate Judah and Israel as You promised

In what way should we imagine God’s help? What was God’s promise? This prayer evokes the words of Isaiah, as he said, “[God] shall come as redeemer to Zion, To those in Jacob who turn back from sin —declares (נאם) the LORD.” (Isaiah 59:20). The first half of the sentence can also be connected to Isaiah and when we say these words we should bring to mind Isaiah’s invocations to awaken the mighty power of the arm of God. “Awake, awake, clothe yourself with splendor. O arm of the LORD! Awake as in days of old, As in former ages! Was it not you that hacked Rahab in pieces, That pierced the Dragon?” (Isaiah 51:9). Recalling the specificity of the primordial combat reminds us that we are not simply asking that God return and improve the mundane matters of our own lives but that God restore God’s wondrous and unfathomable workings in ordering the world. 

The next verse in Isaiah also holds with in it the secret of connecting the redemption blessing to the standing prayer. As Isaiah says, “Was it not you who dried up the Sea, the waters of the great deep? That made the abysses of the sea a road on which the redeemed could walk?” (Isaiah 51:10) That path through the chaos is the path that those who pray use to enter the palace of God in order to make our petitions. When we bless God as the one who redeemed (past tense) Israel, we are counting ourselves among the redeemed who Isaiah evokes in this passage. 

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה גָּאַל יִשְׂרָאֵל

Before saying this blessing, we take three steps back, like someone standing on a beach as the tide approaches. This signifies our awareness of the dangerous power of chaos and that we require God to perform for us the requested miracle in order to enter God’s holy presence. After the blessing, we take three steps forward on the path that God has opened up for us with in the abyss. We take these steps with a sense of profound awe and fear, imagining the abyss surrounding us on all sides, the yawning depths extending into infinity below us, raging waves to either side. In this moment we must put all of our trust in God because this is a moment of supreme danger. 

Shacharit: Amidah 

Now that we have arrived in the presence of God on the bridge that God has extended for us, we must build our own bridge in order to return. That bridge can only be created through sincere prayer in the holy language. During this time we must focus our mind clearly on our requests in the moment and on exact language, in the way a craftsman attends to their work with great focus and precision. Like a craftsman, it is imperative that we trust in our preparation, in the study we have participated in and in all of the previous prayers that we have offered. We must believe in the teaching we have received, in the practice we have undertaken and in the work we have done up until this moment. Once we have called to mind and solidified our own merits, we utter the opening intention for the Amidah: 

אֲדֹנָי שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח וּפִי יַגִּיד תְּהִלָּתֶֽךָ

My Master, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praise.

We now beg God for assistance because we know that our handiwork is flawed. The double edged sword of our preparation and our expertise is that the more we learn, the more we see where and how we fall short. Our intellect and our analytical minds always outstrip our physical ability. Throughout our prayer, our doubts about our own merit and skill will inevitably rise up and interrupt our concentration and our kavanah negatively impacting the integrity of the bridge that will lead us back to safety. In these moments we must ensure that our own judgement is placed in the hands of loving-kindness, for if in this moment of danger we cannot judge ourselves in the direction of merit, all the more so God will judge us harshly. So we begin our prayer with a request for God to create an opening for us to offer a strong and authentic prayer and keep at bay the forces of doubt and harsh judgement that threaten to interrupt and weaken our handiwork. ּ

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹקינוּ וֵאלֹקי אֲבוֹתֵֽינוּ…

Blessed are You, YHVH, our God, and God of our ancestors

When we bow before God we do so out of awe and fear. Bowing increases our fear because we realize that when we bow we are peering into the gaping abyss, the primordial welter and waste. As we lower our bodies, the deepest depths of the ocean are revealed to us and sense that the only thing keeping us from obliteration is the sincerity of the prayer that we offer.

…אֱלֹקי נְצוֹר לְשׁוֹנִי מֵרָע

My God, guard my tongue from evil…

This prayer is our last chance to arouse God’s compassion to help us strengthen our bridge of prayer so that we will not be consumed by the waters of chaos when we return from God’s presence to our own world. This prayer functions as a seal on all of our prayers, a mirror of our opening request ((אדוני שפתי תפתח, here we ask that God guard our our tongue and our lips from evil and deception. This is not just a request for our future utterances but also a request to strengthen our past utterances. Since God functions beyond time, these words actually have the power to bolster the prayer that we have already spoken, because if we say them with full focus and kavanah, we can awaken God’s loving-kindness to extend beyond the boundaries of the time which God has imposed upon us through the attribute of judgement. This is why we invoke God’s right hand twice, ((עשה למען ימינך, הושיע ימינך once to arouse the attribute of loving kindness for our past utterances and once for our future utterances. 

Finally, this meditation completes the seal with the word “my redeemer” (גואלי), in order to mirror the invocation of redemption at the beginning of the Amidah. Just as God extended a bridge for us through God’s past actions as redeemer at the beginning of prayer, here we now extend a bridge back to the material world of our own creation. And why do we refer to God as “my redeemer” at the end of this prayer? It is similar to a craftsman who includes their signature in their work in order to take full credit and responsibility for what they have constructed. Here too we indicate that our bridge back to safety is complete and that we take full responsibility for our prayer and our petition before God. 

After sealing off our prayer we bow one more time, both out of reverence to the divine presence but also to remind ourselves that we stand on a precipice above the abyss and that we may only return to the mundane world through the loving-kindness of God and the strength and authenticity of our prayer.

עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵֽינוּ וְעַל כָּל־יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן:

[God] Who makes peace in their high heavens may [God] make peace upon us and upon all Israel and say Amen.

Upon returning alive, it is also proper to offer thanks to God for creating wholeness in the upper realms where you just returned from and thereby allowing you to live, while also affirming that God will one day return that completeness to our world through the resurrection of the dead.