The Structure of the Shabbat Morning Service

Shirley Holbrook
November 10, 2012

Today I’d like to introduce a new program, divrei tefillah, or words of prayer.

In response to requests from many congregants to learn about prayer, the Adult Education Committee decided to create this series of talks, about twice a month, to be given by members of the congregation.

I won’t ask who here feels ignorant about what happens at our services; that might sound embarrassing. Instead, I’ll simply state that I know that feeling. Years of Hebrew school and junior congregation left me without much under­standing of our liturgy. I attend Shabbat services almost every week and have learned a lot, but still have a long way to go. How can that be? Well, the services are long; and they seem very repetitive. They’re in Hebrew, a language I don’t really know. The words go by so fast that I can’t think about their meaning, even when I do know the Hebrew. Some people move when they pray, and imitating their movements can seem unfamiliar, awkward and unnatural.

So how do we go about developing more understanding and getting more out of these services? Our plan is to take a few minutes during services to explore a small piece of the liturgy. This is intended only as a taste. For further learning we can recommend resources online or in the Abbell Library. Or, if you’d like to explore further in a study group, we can organize one.

* * *

We start by considering the design of our liturgy. Our morning services are organized in a way that may seem confusing. In fact they may seem so long and complex that we can’t even perceive any structure to them. But there is a structure, and being aware of it can help us appreciate what’s going on.

In part the structure reflects the history of our worship:

• The tradition begins with the Torah itself, which gives accounts of tefillah, and, indeed, commands that we do it. Among the 613 mitzvot it includes are those of learning Torah, reciting the shema, and praying daily.
• We can trace Jewish worship back thousands of years, to the days of the Temple, when psalms were sung, the shema was recited, and the Torah was read.
• At the time of the destruction of the Second Temple almost 2000 years ago, rabbis created a liturgy to replace Temple ritual. It still centered on the Shema but also came to include a second major part, the Amidah (prayer said standing), or Sh’moneh Esrei (eighteen benedictions). You will find the Amidah, not only in our Shabbat morning services, but at the heart of each daily service, morning (shacharit), afternoon (mincha), and evening (ma’ariv). In fact, Shabbat services follow the same model as the services for every day, with some special modifications.
• Our Shabbat morning services are long partly because they comprise a series of services. We move from a preliminary service, with psalms – p’sukei d’zimra – into the morning service, adapted for Shabbat. Then there’s the Torah service and the musaf service, with its references to the sacrificial rituals in the Temple.
• This combining of services contributes to the sense of repetitiveness. Furthermore, over the centuries poems and hymns were added, usually in response to older parts of the liturgy. The liturgy wasn’t totally standardized but allowed for personal interpretations by prayer leaders. It wasn’t until the ninth century in Babylonia that the first written prayerbook, or siddur, was created. Our services today consist of layer upon layer of material, all included because it supported the original core of required prayer.

But what if I don’t see or feel how it works? It can be hard to perceive the overall structure and feel its rhythm. Especially if we miss the beginning or other parts, it can seem that the liturgy is random or formless or choppy. But it’s possible to come to perceive the series of services as a design which helps us achieve a special state of being, something important, different from thinking or feeling. When we pray, or daven, we’re trying to do something different from studying or enjoying a performance. We are not chanting a meaningless mantra or moving in a ritual dance. We are not engaging in isolated meditation.

It is easier to say what we’re not doing than what we are trying to do. But I think we have a sense that we’re dealing with something we call holiness, kedusha. In trying to daven we both try to move out of our ordinary lives into this different sphere and seek something to take back to our ordinary lives, something to strengthen and inspire us.

Putting this into words doesn’t necessarily help much. The meaning and reality of kedusha are elusive, hard to sense or grasp. The techniques of davening by which we hope to realize a sense of holiness are difficult to master. So, it seems we’re trying to do something very hard by means of a difficult discipline. Sounds discouraging.

* * *

This is where we can discover the value of our davening traditions. The saying, na’aseh venishma–We will do and we will hear–contains a key. We learn to daven by davening.

The structure of our services developed not just as a historical process of adding more and more. It lasted for millennia because it works – Jews have found it supports our efforts to daven. The beginning, pesukei dezimra serves as a warm-up sequence. It can be used to help us settle down, find calm and focus and readiness. It leads up to the barkhu, which signals the entrance into the heart of the liturgy. The high point is reached with the shema and the Amidah, including the Kedusha itself. The Torah reading is an interlude of study. And the closing hymns act as a cool-down period, preparing us for a return to ordinary social interactions.

Even if at first I cannot enter into the service effectively, some understanding of how it was put together and some sense of how it has worked for my fellow Jews leads me to invest effort in learning and practicing. The fact that I find the same structure every Shabbat, the very repetition within our liturgy support my efforts. The feeling that I’m surrounded by my congregation, people using the same words, the same words that our people have used for hundreds and hundreds of years, adds to the sense that davening is something I can increasingly enter into.

As we continue with our divrei tefillah in the coming weeks, we will explore both the function of our tefillot and their purpose. I close with a few quotations from Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose poetic language gives me glimpses of what we’re aiming for:

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live.

Prayer clarifies our hope and intentions. It helps us discover our true aspirations, the pangs we ignore, the longings we forget.

Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let God's will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to God in our will, an effort to make God the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to God's concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right.

To worship God means to forget the self; an extremely difficult, though possible, act. What takes place in a moment of prayer may be described as a shift of the center of living–from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home.

Shabbat shalom.

→   Divrei Tefillah series webpage.