Self-Reflection

After many years involved in the Jewish world, I’ve been to my fair share of services.  Some are long, some are short, some are engaging, and some are… well, not.  As the regional vice president for religion and education programming in my high school youth group, I even timed the daily evening service to prove to my region we could do it in less than 10 minutes.  We got it down to eight.

Jews are supposed to pray 3 times a day, but not everyone does (I certainly don’t).  This year, many of the services I choose to attend, or find myself attending, have been completed quickly, almost rote, without much meaning or time to reflect built in.  It’s like we’re saying, “we know we have to do it, so we’ll do the bare minimum and just get it done.”  But services devoid of meaning don’t work for me—I might as well not be praying at all, if I don’t have time to make the service meaningful for myself.

The Hebrew word for praying is a reflexive verb—it’s something we do to ourselves.  I’m beginning to wonder whether we should be praying just to get it over with, or if we should truly be embracing the reflective nature of prayer.  Maybe it’s not that we’re supposed to pray three times a day by reciting the same old formula day in and day out, but maybe we’re supposed to truly check in with ourselves three times a day. 

We should ask ourselves, how am I feeling right now?  What do I need?  What do I want?  What am I thinking about?  I’m beginning to wonder if, instead of reciting prayers three times a day, the idea is to truly check in with ourselves and take time for person reflection three times a day.

We often hear of the benefits of mindfulness—of being in touch with our beliefs and thoughts—and it seems to me that G-d might have been aware of them too.  Many of the Jewish rituals have both physical and spiritual benefits—for example, washing our hands before we eat, and taking a full 25 hours each week to rest.  G-d seems to know what’s good for us.  I’m going to choose to understand praying three times a day not as praising G-d three times a day using words whose meanings have been so worn out by repetition, but instead as the self-reflective verb that it is.  By truly checking in with myself three times a day, I believe I can add meaning and spirituality to every day of my life, even if I’m not attending minyan.