Between Me and We Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Jessica: Welcome to Thoughts & Prayers, a show inspiring new connections to Jewish prayer in a changing world. I’m Jessica Fisher.

I recently had a conversation with a friend whose father died about a year ago. She’s not particularly observant or drawn to synagogue or prayer life. She did find herself wanting to stay Kaddish periodically throughout her year of mourning, in part out of loyalty to tradition, in part out of a desire to honor her father, and in part to create space to remember him while surrounded by other people, other voices.

Before COVID, her synagogue held morning and evening services in its chapel daily, but now most of those services were exclusively on Zoom. As we spoke, she reflected that she hated the Zoom service and felt no meaning in participating, but she also recognized that aside from this new experience of wanting to stay Kaddish, she had never supported the minyan by attending it and didn’t have much of an interest in doing so in the future.

Another friend of mine had a different experience when his father died. He found that he preferred to join the Zoom service of the synagogue where he grew up, rather than go in person to his local congregation. It brought him comfort to see the familiar faces of his childhood as he remembered their contemporary rather than to be in a community of people who never really knew his father. And on top of that, the timing of the service suited his schedule better. 

I imagine many of us have had our own experiences with juggling between what’s best for us and supporting others, both in the context of praying and not. Maybe it’s feeling guilty when we need a break from being a caregiver for our aging parents or our young children. Maybe it’s throwing ourselves into volunteer roles for causes that are important to us only to get burnt out.

Similarly, when it comes to our prayer lives, we’re often caught in the tension between what’s best for us as individuals. The perfect time or style or location of a prayer service, and the emphasis on praying in, and therefore supporting a community.

Today we are going to look at different permutations of how people navigate their own needs as individuals and the needs of others through the lens of prayer. This tension is something that plays out in all kinds of ways in North American life. See any number of alarm raising thought pieces about the fracturing of communal bonds, about loneliness, polarization, and more. The push and pull between prioritizing self and community is true of our prior lives too. 

Praying with a community is a core value and expectation in Jewish life, but it’s not always the most direct path towards spiritual fulfillment and divine connection. For some, a deeply personal, intimate conversation with God is an essential aspect of prayer. I spoke to Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, about what it means to develop a relationship with God as an individual, while still feeling tied to the broader Jewish community.

Yossi, I really appreciate your willingness to share your contemplative prayer practice on this show.

Yossi: Well, it’s great to be with you. As you were introducing me, I was thinking, well, what does it mean to be speaking about one’s personal, private, intimate relationship with God in public? And it’s something that I’m not used to doing. 

Jessica: It’s not something most people do, right? It’s one of those conversations you’re not supposed to engage in, in, you know, small talk moments.

Yossi: That’s it. You’re almost not supposed to be doing this interview,

Jessica: Well, I’m really glad that you agreed to do it, and maybe we can just start by talking a little bit about your journey. You’ve prayed in all kinds of settings, including traditional Jewish prayer spaces. Can you start by describing your prayer practice, what it involves, its rhythms, the goals, and why you gravitated toward this practice over other kinds of Jewish prayer?

Yossi: Well, it’s, it’s varied over the years. There were times of intense work on traditional prayer, on the Siddur. That’s not where I am right now, and I could see veering back toward it. It really depends—and again, this is what makes this a personal decision, rather than a formal communal commitment. I’m deeply involved in the Jewish people in Jewish community, and I insist on reserving my relationship with God and creating a private space there. And that’s the one part of my life that I protect from an encroachment of community. And partly I think it is because I’m so relentlessly communal in my Jewish life.

Jessica: And public, right? 

Yossi: And public. And I need, it’s my oxygen. It’s, in a way, it’s what enables me to function publicly, is to carve out this very intimate space, which is just between God and myself. 

And again, as opposed to say, what it was even a few years ago, my prayer life is trying to maintain throughout the day an ongoing conversation with God and. And that means bringing God into whatever is happening in my life. If it’s a good moment, well, it’s a time for gratitude. If it’s a difficult moment, it’s a time for bakasha, for request.

And so in a way, the highest level of prayer is not prayer at all in the way that we understand it, but simple acknowledgement that God is real and, right now, that’s the level of prayer that I’m trying to work on. 

Jessica: Yeah. It’s so, it’s so beautiful and intimate the way that you describe it, right? Just being able to feel that presence and acknowledge that presence and hearing you describe the ways that you, you know, are so immersed in community and Jewish peoplehood in every other aspect of your life. It makes sense that you would want this space that is just for your own relationship with God.

For me, I think praying with other people is crucial to my experience of tefillah. Do you ever feel like you’re missing something by investing so deeply in this particular approach to God?

Yossi: It’s, it’s a great question. I think that I get my spiritual sustenance from community—and I’m emphasizing the spiritual side of it here—by being involved in a shared project of trying to enhance Jewish life, of defending the good name of the Jewish people, working on, on helping to make Israeli society, more in line with what it should be. And that is a form of prayer. I, I, I haven’t thought of it that way until you raised the question. So I—and that, that’s really a way of saying that I don’t feel a lack of community in my prayer life. 

And so I think that if I wasn’t so immersed in Jewish community life, I would need more of community input in my prayer life. But in a way, I really do feel that the work that I do together with my partners is a form of prayer. It’s, it’s, it’s a form of offering yourself. And really, what is prayer? Prayer is stepping out of yourself 

Jessica: Yeah. As you were sort of clarifying for yourself, that you know, all of your communal ties are part of what necessitates and makes practical, this individual practice of yours, it occurs to me that not everybody is Yossi Klein Halevi, right? Not everybody is as deeply enmeshed in the project of the Jewish people as you are in so many moments of their lives, and I’m curious for people for whom that might be true, but who do still gravitate toward this, you know, going into the, going into the woods to find God, or even just sitting in their office quietly and reflecting on God’s presence, what do they owe the community? Right? Whether it’s fighting for the future of the Jewish state, or just showing up to help make a minyan so that somebody can say Kaddish, how does that balance work itself out when somebody’s life is not dedicated to the kind of service that yours is?

Yossi: So I, I actually think that these days especially, we’re all implicated full-time in the Jewish people, whether, whether we acknowledge it or not, but, point taken. I can’t presume to answer. I feel that that’s really an individual decision. I do think, though, that there are basic commitments being part of the Jewish people, and Jewish spiritual work that require a relationship with community.

Judaism works differently than any other religion in the sense that the essence of Judaism is the relationship. That’s the heart of Judaism, and it’s a tumultuous love story. Sometimes God feels betrayed by the Jews. Sometimes the Jews feel betrayed by God. But this is a love story that we’ve carried for 4,000 years and there is no Judaism without the Jewish people 

And so there is no authentic Jewish spirituality without a deep involvement in the Jewish people. It’s much broader and deeper than community. It’s much deeper than being involved in my local synagogue. IThe Jewish people is our synagogue. And the drama of Judaism takes place collectively. The revelation at Sinai did not happen just to Moses. It happened to the whole people, and that was the point.

Judaism is about the democratization of the spiritual, the democratization of revelation. It doesn’t just happen to a select few. It doesn’t just happen to saints. That’s the power of Judaism. And so you must be engaged in the community, but, community isn’t enough. You must be engaged in the Jewish people. 

And if you’re only engaged in your community, in your sliver of the Jewish people, you are missing the essence of what Judaism is trying to tell us, which is, it’s about the whole mess that we call the Jewish people. That’s where the spiritual work happens.

Jessica: That was Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and co-host of For Heaven’s Sake, a podcast about the moral issues affecting Israel, world Jewry, and the future of Zionism.

Yossi has dedicated his professional career and much of his personal time to serving the Jewish people. As he shared in our conversation, this public and service oriented life has in many ways necessitated a more private spiritual life, but for many of us, it is our prayer lives that serve as essential connection points to Jewish community. To pray with a community is to belong and to matter. 

Embedding yourself in a community isn’t always easy to do. Being in community with other people sometimes means praying with people you vehemently disagree with, or praying in a style that doesn’t feel authentic to you. At times, making this kind of compromise is necessary to access belonging, but there are also times when being part of a community demands so much compromise that we find essential parts of ourselves rejected.

For this next segment, Maayan Stutman-Shaw, a college student at Brown University, shares a story about trying to find a place to pray on campus after October 7th.

Maayan: On a Friday night, in my first year of college, I stood on the main green of my campus, shivering in a dress, an arguably ridiculous clothing choice for the middle of winter in Providence. My phone was pressed to my ear. The surface turned tacky by a mix of cold air and the tears running down my face. My mom was on the other end, her voice quiet, trying to comfort me and help me make what should have been a simple decision: How to spend my Friday night. 

You might be thinking that I was asking my mom for advice on what frat party to go to, but I was actually torn between three Shabbat services, two at Hillel and one with Jews for Ceasefire Now. 

So many people have asked me the same question since October 7th: What’s it like to be a Jewish student on a college campus right now? They’re mostly asking about protests, and Israel politics, and if I feel safe on campus. These questions matter, but for me, the biggest impact has been not my sense of safety, but my sense of belonging and community. 

In the fall of 2023, I just returned from the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Hevruta Gap Year, a place where pluralism wasn’t just a word, it was real, messy, and alive.

During Hevruta, I was part of a community where I could learn, debate, explore, and pray with my peers. I hadn’t grown up with a strong Jewish community of kids my own age, and after finally finding that on my gap year, I was nervous about what kind of Jewish community I would find at Brown. 

For the first month of my freshman year, I was immersed in the kind of community I needed. September was filled with Hillel barbecues, meaningful Kabbalat Shabbat services, and Torah study with friends. I was settling into something that felt both familiar and entirely new. There was that lovely warm buzz of belonging. 

And then October 7th, a day of horror and unspeakable grief for Israel and the Jewish people. Though the events of that day unfolded thousands of miles away, the reverberations were felt deeply on many American college campuses, including Brown. A chasm very quickly formed within the Jewish community. At other schools, Hillel grew and strengthened in the months after the attacks. At Brown, the opposite happened. Students started walking away fast. They were leaving because of Hille’s explicitly Zionist stance. These students weren’t Hillel outsiders. They were the ones who had led services, taught Torah, and built the community, and now they were gone. And the vibrant community I had just joined suddenly seemed fragile.

They had formed their own space first called Jews for Ceasefire Now, which they later renamed Jews for Palestinian Liberation. This group wasn’t just a political home, it was a deeply spiritual one too. A robust community that combined protest, prayer, and learning. A community built by people who had once been at the center of Hillel and were now practicing Judaism somewhere else entirely.

And the Hillel community felt their absence. For months Hillel couldn’t get enough people for an egalitarian minyan on Friday nights. The energy was gone. The room felt hollow. So there I was standing in the middle of the main green with my phone pressed to my ear as I weighed the three options that I had for Shabbat services.

One was the Orthodox Service at Hillel, a lively prayer community with beautiful singing that was the type of praying I loved, but with mechitza running through the middle of the room, separating me from my male friends and ensuring that I could never lead services, leaving me only to participate from the sidelines. Just another Jew in the pew. While the students there were always very welcoming, most had gone to the same Jewish day schools and sleepaway camps—they came from a different world, and that distinction felt clear when I was sitting by myself in services. 

Another option was Hillel’s traditional egalitarian minyan, a service where my feminist values and Jewish commitments would be recognized, but one with very few people, sometimes not even enough for a minyan, and as a result, lackluster tefillah.

The third option was Jews for Ceasefire Now. At this service, which was held in the student’s home off campus, the davening was electric. The space was small and the students were filled with passion, the music reverberating throughout the room. Coming to this service met my needs for an egalitarian and deeply rooted Jewish prayer community. But for all the ways this felt like the right fit for me Jewishly, this was an explicitly anti-Zionist space. The front of their homemade siddur featured a disclaimer, explaining that during their Kabbalat Shabbat service, the word Yisrael does not refer to the country of Israel, but instead to the Jewish people, and the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with God.

That disclaimer didn’t work for me. I just returned from a year in Jerusalem. Many of my close friends were actively serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Whenever I faced east to pray, I thought of the country and the time I had spent there, and my friends risking their lives to protect it. 

I don’t remember what community I chose to join that specific night, because this wasn’t just a decision I needed to make that one Friday. It’s been two years of this kind of decision-making, two years of walking into rooms where different parts of me are half seen and half welcome. Two years of deep spiritual loneliness. Since high school, I imagined college as the place where I would find my spiritual home. Instead, I keep having to choose between pieces of myself.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been part of Jewish communities my whole life, and I know how they’re supposed to work, especially when they’re built around something as vital and personal as prayer. To be in a community, you compromise, you bend, because a community in which members don’t need to compromise is not a community at all. It’s an echo chamber. 

But this isn’t bending. This is me breaking. To stand in the cold and be forced to choose between prayer spaces where a core part of my identity or value system is denied is not compromise; it’s erasure. My commitment to gender equality, my love of communal prayer, and my connection to the state of Israel are all core parts of my Jewish identity. And after two years of this, I’m tired. Tired of choosing between my politics and my spiritual and religious needs,

But here’s what I’m holding onto. I keep showing up in all of these spaces even when it’s hard, even when the room feels hollow or I’m not sure where or how I fit, because being a part of a community means showing up, and somewhere, there is a space or there will be a space where I can pray and be in all parts of myself. Maybe that space doesn’t exist yet. Maybe I’ll have to build it myself, but there will come a time where I won’t be standing on that main green shivering and lost. I’ll be walking in the door and I won’t be alone.

Jessica: That was my Maayan Stutman-Shaw, a junior at Brown University, concentrating in Judaic and Africana studies.

I found Maayan’s story relatable, painful, and inspiring all at once. Finding a communal home requires so many variables to align. When you’re hungry for the shared experience of sitting in a room with your voice raised in prayerful song, the lack of that space can compound the feelings of isolation. Yet her insistence that someday she will find or create the kind of prayer community she dreams of is an important reminder not to give up on getting those variables.

People who pray are often caught between a desire for personal spiritual connection and the yearning to be part of something larger than themselves. My colleague, Dr. Elana Stein Hain and I had a conversation about the power of a sanctuary to root us to community, lift our prayers to God, and grant us a greater understanding of our own place in the world.

Elana: So I want you to picture this: my father-in-law, who was a pulpit rabbi for 50 years, back when he was in his twenties serving in Houston, Texas. It’s evening time, a man walks into the synagogue seeking the counsel of the Rabbi. So my father-in-law, of course, invites him into his study. 

Now, the place is locked and there’s nobody else in the building, and the guy pulls out a gun and says, rabbi, I’m gonna kill you. And he explains why—his wife was a member of that synagogue and was going to leave him, and he felt rejected and angry and he needed someone to take his wrath out on, and he chose the rabbi. And so my father-in-law, I’m always amazed by this, he kept his wits about him and he said, you know, before you do anything, why don’t you come with me into the sanctuary so we can pray together for a few minutes? 

And that’s what they did. They walk into the cavernous, quiet, nighttime sanctuary, stand in front of the ark, my father-in-law recites a prayer out loud, and the gunman breaks down weeping. And then my father-in-law was able to convince him to hand over the gun. And thank God, the rest is history. 

Jessica: I can picture myself being the last person in the building. No one else is there. Someone coming in saying they need a rabbi. I don’t know what I would’ve done in this situation. Why do you think your father-in-law invited the gunman into the sanctuary?

Elana: Look, I think one way that I read it is, is just, this is what a sanctuary is. It’s a place where people are invited to pour out their problems with the assumption that God cares about people’s issues and their foibles and their destinies, and about having a relationship with them. So it’s a place where even, even when empty, it holds the prayers of so many flawed individuals and accepts the prayers of so many flawed individuals.

So take a broken man in front of that ark, and maybe he sees a place for himself. Maybe he sees a future for himself. A worth. That’s the power of a synagogue sanctuary.

Jessica: What you’re saying about a person or a person’s prayers being accepted is interesting because, you know, the rabbi spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make that work and guarantee that kind of acceptance. 

And the Medieval scholar Maimonides in his Hilchot Tefillah, in his Laws of Prayer says that people should actually try to pray in a synagogue, in a sanctuary, rather than at home because the synagogue is the place where your prayers are always heard.

Elana: Yeah, it’s interesting, ’cause you know, clearly Maimonides is making a metaphysical claim. He’s saying you, it really will be answered. But there’s also just something about the fact that there is a room that 24/7, in theory, could be a place where even with all the hustle and bustle outside, prayers can be offered there at any time, literally. Not just accepted, but even just offered there, as an oasis of sorts in our crazy world.

Jessica: It’s such a beautiful image, right? This quiet place where you can come no matter what, but it’s a really individualized version of prayer, right? The person who chooses to come to synagogue at any time to pray in this cavernous, quiet space of a sanctuary. You know, that’s just about one person. What about the value of praying in community?

Elana: Okay, so you caught me, in a certain way, because I love that quiet, but to be honest, I don’t think that even in Maimonides’ mind that those are fundamentally disconnected, because that same passage, he also there talks about the importance of praying with the collective and says similarly, God never rejects the prayers of the collective, so even sinners can join in the collective and be part of it. 

So in some sense, both the synagogue space and praying with that larger group of people that usually inhabits that space is not meant to erase the individual, but to actually emphasize that the individual belongs to something bigger than themselves. Right? Meaning the individual belongs to a community with all the opportunity and responsibility that that entails.

Jessica: Yeah, so going back to the gunman, taking him into the sanctuary was a reminder not just about God, but also about all of the other people who typically share that space with your father-in-law. And maybe it even reminded the gunman that he owed those people something too, right? He had a responsibility to them to give them continued access to their rabbi and to keep them in this untarnished, you know, sanctuary of a space to pray in. That makes a big difference. 

The sanctuary might have also reminded him that his story, his pain, his anger, his grief over losing his wife wasn’t the only story that mattered, but that he too, like your father-in-law and all of the other people who come to pray in that space, they’re all part of something beyond each one of them as individuals.

And not only that, but the sanctuary is a reminder that every community is full of people who have made all kinds of mistakes and that there’s a space for them too, and for him, right? He just made a huge mistake of coming in and threatening to kill somebody, but even for him, this space can be redemptive. 

Elana: Well look at what happens when somebody says to the rabbi, my wife, who belongs to this synagogue and I don’t, is leaving me, and the rabbi says, you belong to this synagogue too.

Jessica: You’re part of it.

Elana: Right, it kind of gives you the goosebumps,

Jessica: Yeah, right. This is your space too.

Elana: But can we also talk about how distracting it is to pray with other people? 

Jessica: Oh, beyond.

Elana: Because I think there’s something to that, ’cause I, I’ll tell you, meaning on the one hand I wanna talk to my friends. I so much prefer to pray with strangers because I have no desire to talk to people I don’t know in that context. Afterwards, yes, but not during the prayers themselves. But I think there’s actually a different kind of issue.

You know, you were saying that Maimonide says even sinners can go pray with the collective and their prayers are accepted, I think I sometimes get distracted by, oh, I don’t really wanna be praying in the same room as X. And I really don’t mean that as like the petty, for petty reasons. I mean that for all of our polarization reasons, of, I can’t handle the way this person, you know, thinks about certain issues, acts on certain issues, and yet, humbling experience, you don’t get to curate. I don’t get to curate every group that I’m a part of. Being part of the Jewish people is not me curating carbon copies of myself.

Jessica: Right. I mean, we don’t get to be the judge of who gets to be in the room with us when we’re praying. That’s really, I mean, I think it’s an essential value about how we create our prayer spaces, and it also reminds us that it, the prayer space and that prayer community isn’t just about what we get out of it.

It’s also about what we contribute to the collective, right? Maimonides says that you’re being, actually, a bad neighbor if you choose not to pray in the synagogue, but you pray outside of it instead. Meaning, he’s reminding us that the community only works when everybody actually shows up and commits to being part of it. Do you feel a difference? 

Elana: Yeah, I think it’s such an important thing to talk about in a time where people are losing faith in institutions. People showing up at institutions and showing that they care about those institutions is what gives a future to institutions. So yes, do I love praying privately? Of course, I love praying privately. There’s something so… it has so much integrity to be able to talk to God when nobody else is watching you, because it, it actually is a big question of faith, like, do you actually believe what you are doing right now? 

Whereas when you’re kind of in the, well, everybody’s here doing it, so we’re all kind of doing it, and what is this really about? But I do think that being part of a tzibur, being part of a collective, is actually what allows me to pray privately those times. Because I really do feel like I’m part of what we call Knesset Yisrael, the Jewish people. I don’t come to this as Elana, the individual Jew. I come to this as Elana, a member of the Jewish people. And that’s, that’s the tzibur, that’s the community.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I would say for me, praying with other people is essential. Meaning my tefillah when I’m by myself feels limited, like I’m missing a key part of it. And when I’m praying surrounded by a community of people, even if they’re distracting for all the reasons you shared before, having those people around me actually keeps me focused on cultivating my relationship with God, with our people’s story, and with all these other people in the room who are taking time out of their day to show up in this space and who need my presence as much as I need theirs.

Elana: Yeah, it’s like, some sort of sacred envelope, right? It’s enveloping you and I, I do think it’s interesting, I love that we started with this intensity of a crisis story because sometimes that actually does remind you of just the basic power that a place has or an experience has that we take for granted, because we’ve just become so used to it, right? So to me it kind of says, how do I make sure that even in the non-crisis, I don’t take those opportunities for granted?

Jessica: Yeah, and how do I make sure that I’m checking myself and my instinct to do what’s best for myself by being in relationship to other people, being with community, and making sure that I’m showing up for them? And also recognizing, when they, these people around me have something that I need to hear from them too?

Elana: Yeah, it’s the post-COVID realizations. We actually do need other people and they do need us.

Jessica: Thanks Elana.

That was Elana Stein Hain, Rosh Beit Midrash and Senior Research Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute. She’s also the host of TEXTing, a podcast that explores how classic and modern Jewish texts can help us wrestle with the big dilemmas of our time.

Elana’s story about her father-in-law highlights not only the powerful impact of sacred space, but also the importance of the people who make up that space and the value of embedding yourself in community. But as we each acknowledge in our conversation, this isn’t always simple to do.

Being in community with other people sometimes means praying with people you vehemently disagree with, or praying in a style that doesn’t feel authentic to you. At times, making this kind of compromise is necessary in order to access belonging, but there are also times when being part of a community demands so much compromise that we find essential parts of ourselves rejected.

Each of our contributors today has done a little bit of a dance, trying to have the best of both worlds, a prayer life that is rich and personal, while still finding ways to be tied to, or even responsible to a community.

The Sages, too, tried to imagine the possibility of a robust communal life that also had room within it for a private relationship with God. In our last segment, Rabbi Akiva MAttenson introduces us to a rabbinic teaching about an ancient miracle that may have resonance for our own lives today.

Akiva: 10 miracles were done for our ancestors in the Temple, among them that they would stand pressed together, but could bow spaced apart. What is the meaning of “spaced apart?” Rabbi Yishmael ber Onyan in the name of Rabbi Acha said there was a space of four ammot in every direction between each person, so that no one would hear the voice of their neighbors praying. Vayikra Rabbah, 10:9. 

Praying for our ancestors meant standing pressed together, thronging the Temple courtyard. I want you to imagine how embodied this picture is. The power of praying together is found here in the warmth of bodies pressing against each other, communicating the solidity of their presence to one another.

This power doesn’t really require sharing glances or words. Certainly we do use words and prayer. We use words to confront the brokenness in ourselves and in the world, to ask God to forgive, teach, heal, redeem us. But to say that prayer means standing pressed together is to say that we cannot begin to surface that brokenness and hope for a better world without the comfort and trust of knowing that we are here for each other, come what may.

It’s the loving warmth of that solid ground that allows us to dream. The word in this teaching for pressed together is tzifufim, an unusual word in rabbinic Hebrew. Rabbi Ovadiah of Bartenura suggests that it comes from the verb tzuf, to float. Pressed up against each other so tightly the people’s feet were lifted off the ground and suspended in the air when pressed together close. We are buoyed by each other’s presence, loosed from the gravity of what is and enabled to take flight, dreaming about and praying for what could be. 

Standing pressed together can be encouraging and nourishing, but it can also be stifling. We can feel trapped in the close company of others, unable to move about the way we’d like to emotionally and spiritually. Our rigid, upright posture when praying becomes the expression of a kind of spiritual immobilization. We can also feel lost to ourselves in a crowd. Our individuality effaced, our distinctive spiritual questing reduced to nothing. And so, though our ancestors stood pressed together, the Midrash also tells us that they were able to bow space apart.

Praying requires space, space to bend and stretch and unfurl our limbs, space to move freely. We can’t pray if we are constrained by others. We need to be able to give full expression to ourselves, whether in the movement of our limbs or the perambulation of our hearts and minds. We need the space to find our own voices apart from the press of the crowd.

The word here for spaced apart, meruvachim, can also signify the experience of relief. Space to be ourselves, to speak in our own voice, can be a relief and comfort. We also need space if we are to be vulnerable and intimate with God. Prayer has its communal registers, but it is also an opportunity for profoundly personal intimacy with God.

This is what Rabbi Yishmael bar Onya calls us to notice. Personal space doesn’t only enable us to stretch and bend freely. It ensures that no one can hear each other’s prayers. If we are to pray for our idiosyncratic needs and desires, give expression to our intimate, incommunicable pains and sorrows. We must be able to encounter God in the bare fragility of our own skin, one to one out of earshot of everything and everyone else. 

The magic of the Temple courtyard was that there our ancestors were able to stand pressed together, yet bow spaced apart. They could experience the full power of praying in community without losing anything of the existential richness found in praying alone. As our teaching notes, that is truly miraculous, but we don’t live in a world suffused with miracles. In fact, the sages of this teaching didn’t either. This miraculous synergy between communal and individual prayer was for them a thing of the past of the Temple, that more enchanted place and time. 

The truth of this comes home to me every time I feel torn between praying alone and praying in community, unable to experience the best of both at once. These days, we can’t rely on miracles. We can’t count on our synagogues being spaces that accomplish the wondrous alchemy of standing together and bowing apart, but perhaps we can set our sights elsewhere, on cultivating the spiritual conditions necessary for our synagogues to be places that might be home to miracles.

Let’s be curious and creative about deepening the spiritual nourishment to be had in communal prayer in ways that strengthen and reinforce the work of individual prayer. The synagogue is after all, a mikdash me’at, a minor temple. Small miracles might happen there too.

Jessica: That was Akiva Mattenson, faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute and a content advisor for this podcast.

When prayer communities are functioning at their best, they are places where, yes, people come to pray side by side, but because they brush shoulders as they pray, they know each other, they weave tighter webs of connection, bring meals to people who are sick, come knock on the door when they don’t show up for something, make Shiva calls, and more. And because people put all of these deposits in the bank of relationships by showing up for each other in prayer and in life, they receive those gifts of presence and care in return. Being part of praying communities gives us the spiritual reserves to contribute to the collective.

This is not to say that prayer can and should only happen in the context of community. As we heard in this episode, communal prayer can be about belonging and it can amplify the spiritual power of prayer. But praying with others can also detract from our ability to pray, and sometimes the deepest form of spiritual connection and recharge comes from praying alone.

We live in a time of radical autonomy where we are each free to make our own choices and commitments where we are free and sometimes even encouraged to prioritize ourselves, our needs, and our preferences over the collective. As a society and as individuals, we’ve gained a lot because of this shift, but the caring relationships that nurture us and our communities are fraying as a result.

As you heard from each of our guests, there is more than one way to balance the scales of individualism and community. And each guest in different ways articulated the importance of having both in our lives. Sometimes the most direct path toward God is through private, ongoing dialogue, and sometimes it is the most crowded public spaces that grant us access. Sometimes community can anchor us, but other times it can force us to deny essential parts of ourselves.

There are strands in our tradition that center both types of practices. The rabbis of the Talmud instituted the framework that developed into the fixed communal prayer we experienced today, but they also held up Channah, the biblical woman who prayed silently and alone, as the paradigmatic example of a person in conversation with God. For the sages, then, a rich prayer life may demand some combination of both personal and communal prayer. The key is to find the balance that works.