Mitzvah #5 – “Worshipping God”

I’ve had a hard time recreating my entries for Mitzvah #3&4 (I did them really well the first time and I don’t think I’m hitting the mark as I revisit them), so I’m going to skip to number 5 and go back later..

Rabbi Chavel writes this commandment comes from The Sifre where it says when we’re commanded to “serve” God (numerous places in the torah), it really means we’re to worship God.

First, I went to Google to find out what the heck The Sifre is. A collection of midrash halakhah (commentary on the Torah) on the Books of Numbers and Deuteronomy it turns out. OK. That still means fairly little to me. According to Wiki (yup Wiki) Shimon bar Yochai formed a school of thought which was responsible for the books on Numbers. He lived after the destruction of the temple, and just as Christianity was finding its footing. And he was a disciple of Rabbi Akiva who I always heard about fleetingly on Passover, but whom I came to know more about through the elegiac passages of Annie Dillard’s “For the Time Being”. There I learned that Rabbi Akiva was the rabbi whose flesh was combed from his bones with metal picks by the Romans in a form of torture/execution called ‘flensing’ which I would have to say possibly surpasses crucifixion in its horror.

So it was his disciple who is responsible for determining that to “serve” God means to worship him. Are there other possible meanings? Sure: To study the Torah, To serve him by bringing others to the faith, or to partake in actions consistent with The Commandments for starters.

Apparently though ‘To Serve’ was equated with worship for so long it’s taken for granted. But why does God need worship? Surely not for his ego (we hope, though he seems to be a sensitive guy in the old testament. People ignore him for long enough and he just starts smiting people.

So is worshiping for us? For our own good? Does it teach us to be thankful? Does it do something else for us?

And what makes worship? My favorite church marquee reads “Preach the gospel at all times. Speak only if necessary.” I would like serving God to be setting an example without telling someone what is right or not.

But worship seems to come tied to prayer. And what is prayer? Words glorifying and characterizing the invisible. It seems obvious to say, but animals don’t pray. For some reason we have created or tapped into an idea of God animals don’t seem to be aware of. They’re far more aware of things in the physical world from smells to vibrations to the wind, but they seem to have no apparent interest in God or religion.

Our prayers are composed of words, spoken or unspoken and animals just can’t go there. For some reason it seems a very unnatural act because of this. While religion is about as ubiquitous as food amongst humans, it’s as alien for animals as driving a car. And in fact some can be trained to do that, but I’ve never seen an animal pray.

Perhaps we’re commanded to worship then because it’s so unnatural. If we weren’t commanded to do so, we wouldn’t otherwise do it.

But prayer is more than just words. Maimonides writes ‘prayer without devotion is no prayer at all’. The idea being that simply reciting the words without belief, or deep intention, one shouldn’t have even bothered. Maimonides goes as far to say “One must free his heard from all other thoughts and regard himself as standing in the presence of God.” Chavel goes on to say that in the olden days the pious would spend and hour before and after prayer getting ready to go into that devoted state. And through that buffer they are able to attain a greater closeness to God.

Indeed, Maimonides creates the vision of a very personal relationship with God, enumerating that there must be “the absolute exclusion of the thought of any intermediate power, spirit, or angel, from our prayers, which must be wholly and sole directed to the Lord…”

I have to say this personal relationship is appealing in theory and most similar in my mind to that of fundamentalist Christianity (which of course scares me – as do Hassidim and the orthodox of almost any religion). I don’t know how many Jews in the American secular community really have deep personal relationships with God. But I’d like to think it’s possible to have one without becoming a zealot. In truth, we’re a procedural nation bereft of deep understanding of our own religion. Whether you draw from your own experience or watch something like the Coen Brothers depiction of a bar mitzvah in A Serious Man, it’s clear the Hebrew language alone is an incredible impediment to a close relationship with the text and therefore God. And the result is a nation immersed in culture instead of religion. A nation who goes through the actions of prayer by rote – and by Maimonides standards in vain.

And I have to agree with the big M. There’s little worshipping going on in most temples I’ve been to. It’s not unheard of in some of the more progressive places I’ve gone to like Ikar and Nashuva, but the country club temple I grew up in wasn’t the kind of venue that was conducive to real prayer.

So perhaps spending a little time getting ready to pray isn’t such a crazy idea. Just saying the words hardly seems like it’s enough. Now the real question is. Can you have the devotional intention without knowing the words or saying them? I’d like to think yes, and I’m sure there’s a long debate about it somewhere in the Talmud.