But Repentance, Prayer, and Tzedakah…—Elul 12

“But repentance, prayer, and tzedakah can avert the evil decree.”  What do we mean when we repeat this phrase during the month of turning toward the One?  First, these three, repentance, prayer, and tzedakah are not separate actions. It is not that we make teshuvah and then, or also, pray and give tzedakah.  Prayer and tzedakah, are part of the larger process of repentance or turning.  Teshuvah is a process that involves the transformation of the whole person and thus is necessarily multi-dimensional.  It includes actions toward the Wholly Other and actions toward others; it is not an interior process of feeling that begins and ends with the individual.  Prayer is primarily (not exclusively) communion or an active relating to God.  Tzedakah is communion or active relating in righteousness to others.

We’ve talked about prayer as “being present to the Presence” and “paying attention” to the fullness and depth of the reality that surrounds us at every moment.  We’ve also talked about the aloneness of the life of the spirit.  It’s important not to interpret this in an individualistic, privatistic, or passive way, however; for even at its most still, prayer is an action in relation to the world, and even at its most solitary and private, prayer is—to use that old-fashioned word—communion.  It’s common to hear people say, “When we pray, we talk to God; when we read Torah, God talks to us.”  But prayer is not a monologue. When we pray we are doing what all meditators do—trying to commune with a reality larger than our puny and deluded selves.  We are trying to enlarge our spirits to touch, to taste, to see, to hear, to smell—you can use whatever language you want—a reality or way of being beyond our ordinary experience, a reality so overwhelming in both vastness and intimacy, distance and nearness, that everything else is thrown into a new perspective, a reality so far surpassing our reason and imagination that our very existence is called into question. 

To be called into question—that is why we pray, why we enter that space of communing.  And that is why we need to pray, in whatever form is native to our temperament and circumstances.

When we pray in this way, not talking to God or at God, but communing with that Other who calls us into question, we are transformed, we  become new.  That is one way that prayer can alter the world by “averting the evil decree.” By praying during Elul we are not necessarily petitioning God to alter or magically erase a judgment against ourselves as individuals; we are seeking to become whole, to live lives of righteousness and mercy in all our relationships and actions in the world. That changes not only ourselves, but the world, and thus can help avert the evil decree of injustice that so many innocent people today suffer under. For when we turn at the root of our being from evil to good, we act in the world for good, containing and combating evil, transforming the evil we encounter into good, and creating new opportunities and structures for the good.

Don’t underestimate the power of prayer, the action of communing, enlarging one’s spirit beyond the narrow strictures of the self, opening oneself to radical transformation, in the work of social justice in the world.