Clergy and Educators

ICJS 2003
Clergy Colloquium

Praying Together?
or Coming Together to Pray?

Background

One of the responses to the shocking events of Sep-tember 11, 2001, was a gathering in Yankee Stadium in which representatives from a number of different reli-gious traditions offered prayers for those who had been killed, for their families, and for this nation. Following that event, one of the participating clergy was suspended by his denomination because he had prayed publicly with non-Christians. His suspension and the rationale behind it prompted the ICJS scholars to question both the possibility and the desirability of public prayer in a religiously diverse society.

The questions they formulated became the framework for several programs carried out by the Institute this year, including the Fall 2002 meeting of the Jewish and Christian Educators Study Group, the 2003 Congrega-tional Project, and the first ICJS Clergy Colloquium, which was held on May 7, 2003. Under the direction of Executive Director Christopher Leighton, Roman Catholic Scholar Rosann Catalano, Jewish Scholar Charles Arian, and Associate Scholar John Roberts, a group of rabbis and Christian clergy spent an afternoon wrestling with the difficult issues that arise when Jews and Christians try to pray together. After three hours of sometimes intense discussion and debate, the participants suc-ceeded in generating almost as many questions as they answered.

Since the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies has devoted much time and effort this year to programs exploring the problems involved in shared prayer, it may be instructive to visitors to our ICJS Web site to read a detailed report of the labors of one of the groups who undertook a no-holds-barred examination of these prob-lems.

Introduction

Rabbi Arian introduced the Colloquium by pointing out that, until very recent times, an individual's religious community was for the most part his social community as well, so that the notion of shared prayer seldom, if ever, suggested itself to anyone. Praying together is a novum, a fruit of modernity and contemporary society. The desire to pray with other religious communities is especially strong in times of tragedy, but it may also arise on holidays and when people celebrate life-cycle events. Following this introduction, Rabbi Arian then posed the central question around which all the activ-ities of the afternoon revolved: Can we pray together with integrity and theological legitimacy?

Task #1

Participants tackled this question by engaging in four different tasks. Their initial task involved defining the terms of the discussion: What is prayer? What makes a prayer distinctively Christian? What makes a prayer distinctively Jewish? Prayer, both personal prayer and prayer as part of a set liturgy, was defined as an inner dialogue and as an expression of a person's relationship with God. The Christian clergy present identified the fol-lowing as characteristic of "Christian" prayer:

• The prayer is offered in the name of Jesus, or in the name of the Trinity. (This qualification is not mandatory, since the Lord's Prayer has neither a Christological nor a Trinitarian focus.)
• The prayer is informed by Christian theology and/or by the Christian story.
• If the person praying the prayer is a Christian, then the prayer is a Christian prayer.

The rabbis present identified the following as character-istic of "Jewish" prayer:

• Prayer is communal (a minyan is required).
• Prayer is commanded, and it is a response to the covenant relationship.
• Prayer is time-bound rather than space-bound: It is commanded at certain times of the day and on particular occasions.
• Prayer involves the establishment of a dialogue: Prayer speaks to God and bounces back to the community.
• The formulation of the prayer makes it Jewish; it begins and ends with certain words. There is a set liturgy that involves actions as well as words.
• There is a "uniform" for prayer: tallit and tefillin.
• Prayer is not mediated.
• Hebrew and Aramaic are used in prayer.

In the course of this discussion, the rabbis were asked whether Jews pray privately and non-liturgically. Some Jews, it was explained, have picked up from the larger society the idea that "spontaneous prayer" is part of religion; but this kind of prayer, which is very natural to many Christians, has not historically been part of the Jewish religious experience for several reasons. Jews are obligated to pray three times a day, and there are one hundred blessings that must be said every day (although many of those blessings are part of the three communal services). In addition, the grammar of Jewish prayer has been established by the tradition: Prayers begin and end with formulas found in the Talmud. Both the require-ments of Jewish prayer and its characteristic structure make it less likely that Jews will engage in spontaneous prayer. Although the Talmud and Chassidic literature both contain private prayers that had been offered by various rabbis and sages, for the most part spontaneous prayer is not common among Jews.

Just as it seemed that this task of definition had been successfully completed, it was pointed out that charac-terizing Jewish prayer is a somewhat uncertain activity because "prayer" isn't really a Jewish word. So, as participants moved on to their second task, it remained unclear whether the Jews and Christians present were actually talking about the same thing when they were asked to define or describe "prayer."

Task #2

Participants then engaged in an general discussion of the nature of interfaith prayer services. This discussion began to draw out the variety of problems that make shared prayer such a thorny issue. The religious identity of a people and the boundaries of the group are, in large measure, shaped by prayer informed by that group's tradition. The boundaries clearly set by a group's reli-gious identity can lose some of their sharpness when different religious groups attempting to share prayers also share American identity. Religious identity and national identity become confused. Interfaith services like the ones organized in the aftermath of the loss of life and the destruction of September 11 must contend with these separate and shared identities overlapping with each other, and the misunderstanding that is in-evitably generated can also generate tension.

Moreover, Jews tend to be more comfortable with reli-gious particularity than Christians are. Christians, with the best of intentions, try to be more inclusive without truly understanding the boundaries between the two communities, and that Jews and Christians cannot really "pray together" but only "come together to pray." What usually happens, therefore, is that interfaith services offer secular prayers that are spoken by religious figures, but the prayers are unrelated to the speaker's identity as a rabbi, priest, pastor, imam, etc.

Task #3

In the third task of the afternoon, participants were asked to concretize their discussion of interfaith services by imagining a situation in which the civic community has experienced a tragedy of some sort, a cataclysmic event in which there has been much suffering, pain, and loss. The community wishes to reestablish a sense of equilibrium and restore a sense of connectedness in a prayer service. The Colloquium participants are called upon in their capacity as religious leaders to form a committee to construct the service. In their planning, they are asked to establish the specific purposes of the service, set up guidelines in accordance with which the service will be conducted, and determine what the prayers will look like in the light of the objectives and guidelines established.

The purposes of the service suggested by the partici-pants were:

• To provide consolation, comfort, hope, unity, and strength.
• To rescue meaning from despair.
• To promote healing within the community.

The guidelines established for the service were:

• The gathering should be a coming together to pray, not an attempt to pray together.
• An interfaith gathering will draw people who are not religious. Their psychological and emotional needs must also be met.
• The purposes of the service should be addressed within the context of prayer.
• Each speaker should give a faith statement out of his or her own tradition, speaking that tradition's specific language of prayer (e.g., Christians should not be required to omit the name of Jesus).

This third guideline immediately gave rise to a significant question: If each speaker speaks his or her tradition's specific language of prayer, would participants want the prayers to be prayers to which all in attendance could say "Amen"? The initial response to this question upped the ante in the ensuing discussion: The God to whom Jews and Christians pray is the same God, but much Jewish prayer is particular, often using the words "we" and "us." Christians may think that "we" and "us" in-cludes them, but Jews would not agree. It may become problematic for Jews, therefore, when Christians partici-pate in a Jewish prayer, because there is in that participation an implied sense of belonging that Jews do not recognize.

For every solution suggested to this problem there were reasons given why the solution wouldn't work:

• Suggestion: Recite psalms in place of prayers. Objection: The recitation of psalms only works within the Jewish and Christian traditions.
• Suggestion: Use the things we share in our traditions to provide comfort and solace. Objection: No prayer will succeed in bringing everyone together because there are people who are not religious and who do not pray.
• Suggestion: Do things that are non-verbal, e.g., using music, light, art, water; holding hands; planting something; retrieving religious symbols that are sufficiently universal and evocative to convey meaning. Objection: Those who come to such an event might find meaning and healing, but this kind of service provides no context for rela-tionship with God; it is not a "prayer service." The point of a prayer service is to speak to God. Creating or healing community, while an intended outcome, is not the primary aim of the service.
• Suggestion: Pray "secular" prayers that avoid offending anyone. Objection: Doing this requires a religious person to step out of his or her tradition, to bracket his or her Judaism/Christianity. In fact, everyone who comes to the event is forced to bracket out particularity in order not to give offense.

Participants posed two further questions: What is the point of having a secular service if it doesn't say any-thing to anybody? And does this mean that people of different faiths can never come together to pray? These questions suggested one more guideline for the service: "Don't ruin the service for my religious community."

Although the scenario set up for planning the prayer ser-vice was intended to be generic, the participants could not avoid thinking in specific terms of what happened after September 11. Consequently, one participant raised the danger of Americanizing a prayer service in a community in which not everyone is an American, in the wake of a disaster in which quite a number of the vic-tims were not Americans. Under such circumstances, civic religion can easily slide into nationalism. This warn-ing inspired a lively debate that included the following points:

• What was assailed on September 11 was national identity, not religious identity: We were attacked because we are Americans.
• It is appropriate to come together in those condi-tions, but perhaps the service should be one of healing or memory, not a service of prayer.
• We were attacked as Americans, but the attack was carried out in the name of God. The response should also be made in the name of God.

This segment of the program ended with a rhetorical question: The pressure for clergy to participate in public prayer services is enormous, but since the integrity of particular religious traditions is undermined in these ser-vices, should clergy dare to say a courageous "No" when asked to join in?

Task #4

The afternoon's events concluded with the reading and discussion of a (Roman Catholic) Christian prayer for peace that had been written in response to September 11. In this final activity some of the dangers participants had spent hours discussing in the abstract were con-cretely illustrated. The prayer was judged by the rabbis present to be both politically and theologically prob-lematic, in that it contained an uncertain reference to Israel and was offered in the name of Jesus. But there was also a more general negative reaction to the prayer because it was felt that the prayer implied that we somehow deserved what happened to us and that we should therefore think before responding. Participants found this notion offensive to them as Americans.

The program came to an end with one more attempt to redefine the guidelines for public prayer, another round of questions, and nothing definitively settled.

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