Prayer

Art Green has called prayer “the living heart of Jewish faith, the daily outpouring of the soul before God.” Judaism has always tried to strike the proper balance between fixed, prescribed prayer, on the one hand, and spontaneous creative prayer, on the other. Prayer is both a deeply personal phenomenon, and one that is shared and held by the collective.

At Congregation Beth El, we try to give people different outlets for gathering together and expressing prayer. Sometimes prayer happens when we are engaged in song, sometimes when we are fiercely debating a story in the Torah, sometimes when we are dancing, sometimes when we are sitting in silence. Every Shabbat morning from 10am-noon, our community gathers for song, story and Torah discussion. Every Tuesday morning from 7:00-7:45am there is a morning meditation in the sanctuary, and we offer once a year day-long meditation retreats in the spring. We also gather on the first Friday evening of every month from 6:00-8:15 for musical Friday night services with singer-songwriter Bernice Lewis – a service for families from 6:00-6:45pm, services for adults from 7:30-8:15pm, and a community-wide potluck shabbat dinner in between, because prayer also happens when we break bread together. There are also alternative chanting or musical services on selected dates, so keep tabs on our calendar of events.

If we extend and expand our notion of prayer, we could say that our social action work, whether raising money for Darfur or offering ‘soup kitchen’ lunches to those in need in the Bennington community are also examples of prayer. When Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Martin Luther King on Shabbat in Selma, he famously said that his “feet were praying.”