Conservative Judaism

In her stirring account of living and dying with leukemia, Gale Warner, a young, passionate, life-affirming woman, mentions prayer as one of her essential inner supports. I can think of few observations on this challenging subject which have helped me more. "Prayer," she writes, "is a call for partnership, a conscious placing of our spirits and intentions in alignment with the creative spirit. This call to partnership is always noticed. It affects the whole. It can help tilt the balance, draw forth hidden resources. So prayer—humble, undemanding, simple prayer—is always worth it."¹

It is this concept of prayer as partnership that I would like to explore in the context of Rabbi Artson's articulation of Process Thinking. If the latter indeed "offers a way to recover a . . . dynamic articulation of God, world, and covenant," then the idea of prayer as partnership takes on a deeper reality.² It offers a key opportunity for participation in what Hans Jonas, in a seminal essay to which Artson refers his readers, describes as the very becoming of God "who experiences something with the world," whose "own being is affected by what goes on in it," and who "responds to the impact on His being by worldly events, not 'with a mighty hand and outstretched arm,' as we Jews on every Passover recite in remembering the Exodus from Egypt, but with the mutely insistent appeal of His unfulfilled goal."³

Any serious investigation of the subject of prayer implies a consideration not only of the role of prayer itself but also of the intractable questions of who we are, who God is, what the context is in which we have the opportunity of addressing one another, and what the limitations of that encounter are. Too often these attendant issues are left unexplored, hence assumed within the presumptive framework of what Artson critiques as the over-Aristotelian [End Page 36] context of God's omnipotence: God knows all and can do all, we are merely God's creatures; hence, all we can do is supplicate the deity in the hope that God will respond to our entreaties with a yes, a no, or a maybe. The task of confronting such unanswerable questions is, of course, impossibly great. But Artson's essay, as deeply familiar in some ways as it presents novelty in others, sets a different context for the engagement between God and living beings, one in which—for someone like myself—prayer makes far deeper sense. It is the quality and potential of this relationship as experienced through prayer that I hope to begin to explore in this short response to his essay. I would like to begin with some reflections, rooted in traditional texts, on prayer itself. These lead to conclusions long ago embraced within the Jewish mystical tradition, but which make particular sense and take on new possibilities within the theological context described by Artson.

In a short but seminal sugya the Talmud throws into question the notion that the significance of prayer is to be measured by any specific practical response on the part of God.⁴ "Those who pray at length," it declares, "will find that their prayer does not come back empty." This statement is cast into immediate doubt with the single-word interrogative "Inni? Can that really be so?" with which the Talmud so often undermines what seems like a reasonable assertion. What, it asks, about the tradition that one who prays u-m'ayyein bah will achieve only heartache for such pains? The difference clearly turns on the challenging clause u-m'ayyein bah, which, although it appears to suggest the virtue of deep engagement, and does indeed mean precisely this in other contexts, must here be understood negatively. The person who prays in this manner, explains Rashi, believes that persistence will eventually overcome God's resistance; in other words, u-m'ayyein bah might be translated here as "has a vested personal interest in." Thus, when we pray not simply for the sake of prayer but in order to obtain results, to convince the recalcitrant deity to alter the divine mind, then we...