The Landscapes of Prayer, Glimpsed from the Train Window
Rabbi Yaakov B. Friedman
Years ago, while living in a community abroad, I had occasion to travel for eight hours by train from the city of Bergen, in Norway, to the capital, Oslo. It is one of the most breathtaking journeys imaginable — like leafing through a dream photo album. Every bend in the track, every climb or descent, brought with it experiences from another world altogether: rivers winding through vast forests, snow-capped mountain peaks, and endless cascades of waterfalls.
And yet there you sit — eight straight hours, exhausting hours, in the same car, on the same train. The same monotonous clatter of the wheels. The same seat. The same neighbor staring blankly across from you. You can experience the journey as a sentence handed down from the heavens — or, with a better perspective, you can turn that very train car into a magnificent viewing platform onto the full spectrum of life, its landscapes and its colors.
The most familiar obstacle to connecting with prayer is the fixed text. The text that never changes. How can a person genuinely feel chiyut (vitality, aliveness) from Re’eh na be-onyenu — “Look, please, upon our affliction” — recited three times a day, 1,260 times a year?
Re’eh na be-onyenu is the train. On the surface: the same car, the same seat. The same riva rivenu — “Champion our cause” — and the same ki El go’el chazak Atah — “for You are a powerful Redeemer.” Day after day, year after year.
The difference lies entirely in the question of whether you are simply sitting in the prayer car and muttering, or whether you are turning the prayer into a vehicle for expressing your daily struggles and experiences — seeing through the prayer the landscapes of your own life and feelings.
The path to experiencing prayer as vivid and close is simpler than we imagine. How do we experience it? By connecting the words of the prayer to the good and difficult things that pass through our lives every day.
When a young man pours himself into Re’eh na be-onyenu, and as he prays he is quietly turning over in his mind the humiliation he suffered just that morning — when the dormitory supervisor dressed him down in front of all the other students; the sting of being mocked in the study group (chavurah) for not knowing the passage about the “nine shops” (a Talmudic legal discussion); a humiliation that still burns, a sadness that still aches — and he links that pain to the words of the prayer, he can transform those words into a moving, intimate conversation between himself and his Creator.
And when he arrives, later in the prayer, at the words “we will recount Your praise for our lives which are entrusted into Your hands… and for Your goodness at all times” — and he recalls the fact that he was accepted today into the yeshiva his heart had longed for, that joyful memory still engraved in his bones lifting his spirit — he pours that gladness into the words of the prayer as well.
Prayer is conversation — as the verse says of Isaac, “And Isaac went out to converse [lasuach] in the field” (Genesis 24:63) — and it is connection, as the verse says, “I have struggled mightily [niftalti] with God” (Genesis 30:8). Whoever uses the words of the Amidah (the central standing prayer, also called the Shemoneh Esreh, or “Eighteen Blessings”) to speak with the Almighty about the small and great events of his life creates the most wondrous bond of all.
Never merely quote the words of the prayer. You must learn to breathe a living soul into them.
When the prayer is truly yours — carved from your own soul — you will be able to return to it again and again with ever-deepening vitality. And even though the car is the same car, and the seat is the same seat — the landscapes will change.
When prayer is nothing more than a quotation from the Men of the Great Assembly (the ancient body of sages who composed the liturgy), your own self remains outside — and you go from being someone who prays to someone who merely mumbles.