Overcoming a Mitzvah Learned by RoteObservations on Spiritual Renewal Before Yom Kippur, 2006

Overcoming a Mitzvah Learned by Rote Observations
on Spiritual Renewal Before Yom Kippur, 2006
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg

On Yom Kippur, we read in the morning the stirring passage from the prophet Isaiah from chapter 58. The prophet questions the religious piety of Israel who engaged in a fast. "To be sure, they seek Me daily, eager to learn My ways... They are eager for the nearness of God: Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed." The prophet dismisses their so called piety and points out what is missing in their religious priorities: "Because you fast in strife and contention and you strike with a wicked fist...Is such the fast I desire?"

Isaiah, the biblical prophet, exposes disordered and misplaced spiritualityof people who appear to be pious. In chapter 29 Isaiah (who according to biblical critics is a different prophet than the one in 58) describes a people who have lost sense of the purpose of prayer. 'Because the people has approached Me with its mouth and honored Me with its lips, But has kept its heart far from Me, and its worship of Me has been a commandment of men, learned by rote.' Isaiah describes people who follow God's law with thought or intention-"mitzvat anashim melumadah."

This pointed complaint about habituated religious ritual is the precedent of an oft repeated criticism within Judaism and a familiar attack on Judaism from without including the passages from Paul of Tarshes polemics of the Pharisees in the New Testament. But it is fair to say that Isaiah's concern is a deeply Jewish time honored concern, one that is found across the generations from Maimonides in 12th century Egypt to the Hasidim in 18th century Russia.
My vision of Panim Hadashot is deeply indebted to Isaiah's concern. As an observant person, I know how easily mitzvot and practice can become habituated or taken over by conventional considerations.

There is a time in our lives when we need to renew, reinvigorate, reorient what is familiar. This is true of spiritual life as in all other areas of life. I believe that it is critical in a serious spiritual life to be ready at times to change perspective, to move out of one's customary seat, to change the seder of things. Our eyes would open up to things we could not see or did not sense. We may return to the original place we started but we will see things differently.

This need for "refreshing one's perspective" is particularly critical concerning the mitzvah of fixed communal prayer. Contemporary communal prayer in all the denominations is governed by conventions of decorum, music, and contemporary culture, which often obscure the deeper meaning, and experience of prayer.

Most modern Jewish institutions from synagogues, schools, and camps attempt to teach the forms of prayer, but often neglect how a worshipper accesses the inner life. Another problem is that prayer is usually taught in connection to life cycle events such as Bar Mitzvah making it seem like a ritual task to be put on display as opposed to a lifelong skill for self-reflection and self-judgment. Another very common contemporary problem is the one identified in Isaiah 58: the ritual of prayer is not placed in the context of a concern for the moral life and social justice.

How then do we prevent prayer from becoming a "mitzvah melumadah?" I think there needs to be a place in the community for people to renew their prayer life. It should not be an alternative community because prayer in any community becomes captive to communal expectation and convention. Rather there should be a place you go to shake things up a bit, to get a different perspective, and return to one's prayer home with a mitzvah mehudeshet-a mitzvah refreshed.

That is the aim of the services Panim Hadashot offers on the High Holidays. We offer people a prayer experience outside of the regular mode which makes it possible for them to get in touch with the original inspiration of prayer in Judaism. The purpose of such gathering is not to form community, but to inspire and evoke renewal and reorientation. It is meant to seed reflection and to plant the source of insight. My hope is that insight gained in these gathering will deepen this person as they connect to a more permanent community of prayer.

The metaphor to describe what Panim Hadashot does with our approach to High Holidays is "recharging batteries". Everyone needs a recharging of batteries in their spiritual lives. That is one way we can respond to Isaiah's challenge of a mitzvah done by rote. Allow yourself the opportunity to renew and that can make you "return" home with a greater field of spiritual vision than you had before.

Gemar Hatimah Tova,
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
September 2006