Leaving your child at kindergarten is always a heart-wrenching and scary experience, day after day. One bright morning I decided - like any typical hysterical mother – to go into work a little later and to listen once and for all to what they are telling my daughter behind my back.
After some 10 weary minutes of morning prayers, the kindergarten teacher began her speech of rebuke over the lack of sincerity in prayer. "Tomorrow I would like all of you to be sincere when saying your prayers," she reprimanded them. "At our kindergarten," she emphasized, "all children pray sincerely. God loves your prayers even more than mommy and daddy's prayers, and you can really change things if you pray sincerely. Therefore, from tomorrow, I want to hear everyone praying with absolute sincerity." How simple.
It's been quite a few years since I last heard such an ethical conversation, and it was hard to shirk it. I couldn't help recalling my prayer from that morning. Did I meet the kindergarten's standards? Of course not. How many years has it been since I last prayed with "sincerity"? How long has it been since that defining moment when I began to doubt the kindergarten teacher's sharp words: "If you pray sincerely you will be able to make a change"?
My thoughts took me back some ten years, to that night when my grandfather collapsed and was taken to the emergency room. After long hours of waiting outside his room I decided "to take action" and in the middle of the night I went to the Western Wall to pray for his recovery.
There, in the most sacred place to the Jewish people, practically at the gates of heaven, while in prayer, it happened. That's when the doubt starting seeping through, putting to the test every element of certainty. What do you really expect, I asked myself, that following your prayer, a 77-year-old man with a heart ailment and cancer eating away at his body will suddenly arise fit and healthy from his sick bed? Do you really think this is what's going to happen, even if you pray really hard? As a rational human being, I knew - more than that - I felt that the answer was negative. I shut the prayer book at that very moment, and I knew that what had occurred could never be undone.
Since that night every prayer confronts me with difficult questions pertaining to faith. Does the divine entity I pray to actually exist? Does it have the power to change reality? What is the extent of its "will" to change reality, and other fundamental questions regarding religion?
As if this were not enough, no less complex moral conflicts arise with each prayer. When I, as a rational humane feminist say the words "will return your judges as at first, and your advisers as at the beginning” (Isa. 1:26), "do I really mean what I am saying? Do I really want to bring back the regime that didn’t recognize women as equal to men? Do I really wish to bring back the melancholy regime that would end the democratic and liberal tradition in which we live?
And when I recite the prayer from the Seder Ha'avoda on the holiest day of the year, do I really wish for the return of the high priest with all the sacrifices and spilling of blood it involves?
And if the answer to all these questions is negative, why am I praying? Is there any value in such prayer? In other words, with the reciting of a single prayer, can I rid myself of all the doubts that are an inherent part of me? But on the other hand, will I stop praying because of them?
Perhaps the kindergarten teacher was right after all. Because if a mother's prayer looks like this, children would do well to pray seriously, as long as they possibly can.
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