Your Wellsprings of Compassion - A Prayer
One of my favorite ways of expression is prayer. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. I can remember praying and writing my own prayers down meticulously for as long as I can remember. I would speak with God always, and my AuDHD brain, NEEDING a record of it, always would commit them down to paper always. I don’t remember a time in my life when anything was different. I would go outside into the woods or farms near my home, and simply speak and write to God. Like a conversation. Unfiltered. While I came to understand the concept of Hitbodedut during high school, I had been practicing this form of prayer meditation for my entire life.
My prayers don’t always look like what one expects of prayer, even by a Jewish standard. To most readers, prayer, whether Jewish or not, is a fixed practice. Words in a book that are read it. But prayer comes from someplace. They were written down once upon a time. They were the words that someone used to express themselves to the Almighty at one point or the other. They aren’t a dry formula, but a very alive and visceral thing.
Writing one’s own prayers and reciting them regularly may surprise even some of my fellow Jewish people, but it has a long and solid history in the Jewish tradition. Many of our prayers from the Siddur are not Biblical in nature, and even the main part of our prayer, the Shemonah Esrei / Amidah dates to the days of the Second Temple. ALL of the Piyutim that we recite date from at earliest the 6th Century, Kabbalat Shabbat’s famous Lecha Dodi prayer from the 16th Century, and my favorite, Yedid Nefesh, from the 17th Century. Prayers have been written always and continue to be so. Many would consider Debbie Friedman’s Mi Sheibeirach a type of modern prayer (I certainly do).
Now, to the point of this post! I am CONSTANTLY rearranging my files, my books, my notebooks, and other parts of my home. I love organization and being AuDHD I sometimes find myself creating some chaos in the home and need to bring it back to order every few months. Today I came across an old notebook of mine. Like many of you surely, I write in a number of notebooks and journals at any given time. I have my notebook for day-to-day stuff, my work notebook, a notebook for things I’ve read (a commonplace book), a notebook for my political affairs, a notebook for random things, a notebook for ideas for my fiction, a notebook for my poetry, and lastly, a notebook for my spiritual affairs.
I treasure my spiritual notebooks and have all of them, 21 years worth of them. Today I came across one from my days as a rabbinical seminary student, in 2006-2008. I was living in Jerusalem during what was a difficult time for Israelis and Palestinians, just a year after the end to the Second Intifada. Tensions were still, as they are now, extremely high as anyone who has lived or visited in Jerusalem can attest to. It pained me to see so many of my fellow seminary students engage in xenophobic, unloving, and even at times, violent rhetoric. My path to seminary was based on and in love, respect, and making the world a better place. I could not, and still do not, understand how any person of faith can arrive at a place of hate and violence. To me, this is the opposite of everything my faith, and any faith, is about.
I penned this prayer following an eruption of violence in Jerusalem’s Old City in August of 2007, instigated by Far-Right Jewish religious extremists and my deep sadness that some of my fellow seminarians, including my study partner, were involved with some of the agitation and dehumanization of our fellow humans.
The words struck me today as I came across them and my point of mind in those days. They are as true today as they were 16 years ago. We haven’t made much progress. In fact, in many ways, we’ve gotten further away from the plot and from peace.
I have translated my prayer, not literally, but to give a sense of the original Hebrew.
