Communal prayer is an expression of a group's innermost longings. In prayer, a community dialogues with its God. The community expresses its needs, its desires, its hopes and dreams. It's no wonder that the folk aphorism has it that "the family that prays together, stays together."

But prayer is not only the expression of a group. Prayer often creates and defines a group. Groups by their nature are exclu-sionary; by defining who is in, they also define who is out. Whenever I am called upon to craft a service, which expresses the identity and desire of the community, I am forced to define the community's boundaries.

A number of years ago, Rabbi James Diamond wrote an article for Cross Currents called "Liturgical Chastity." He wrote that we should "understand the act of worship in terms phenome-nologically similar to those in which we understand the act of sex . . . Both are private. They flow from the deepest regions of the self. They are connected to how we live out and express as individuals our most fundamental identities."

If this is so, Diamond writes, then interfaith worship has the character of group sex. Though at first it may seem "innova-tive and even exciting," at the end of the day it is "trivial and inauthentic."

Diamond's comparison of prayer to sex may at first seem shocking. But prayer is indeed an intimate act, one that makes us vulnerable. Attending services of a group different than one's own can make one feel very much an outsider or even a voyeur. Conversely, when a congregation is overwhelmed by a large number of visitors who are not familiar with the service and do not participate (either visitors of another religion, or guests at a life-cycle event), regular worshippers will often note that the quality of their own prayer experience suffers.

While I'm not certain that I agree with Diamond's description of it as "trivial and inauthentic," interfaith worship is not without its problems. Services that bring together Christians and Jews have been taking place in America for well over one hundred years. Throughout most of that time, the ground rules have called for a "neutral" service. The content of the prayers was meant to be something that everyone present could affirm. This meant that Christians were expected to omit any Chris-tological or Trinitarian references. Jews were often, though not always, expected to omit Hebrew (not because there is any theological objection to Christians worshipping in Hebrew, but because it was considered exclusionary and inaccessible). On a theological level, Jews were also expected to omit the many references in Jewish liturgy to Israel's chosenness and the Jewish sense of a unique mission and destiny.

These neutral services may not offend, but what do they accomplish? Rabbi Donald Berlin, rabbi emeritus of Oheb Shalom here in Baltimore, notes, "I am invited (to participate in these types of services) because I am a rabbi, but then I am told to say something that has nothing to do with the fact that I am a rabbi." Participants may leave the room feeling that they have done something positive in demonstrating good will towards people of other faiths. But is that what prayer is for? Is that even authentic prayer?

A neutral service requires Jews and Christians to check their distinctive identities, and their distinctive ways of praying, at the door to the sanctuary. Christians and Jews, under this set of ground rules, can pray together only by temporarily sup-pressing the fact that they are Christians or that they are Jews.

There is something deeply unsatifsying about this suspension of our religious particularity and identity. If we believe that, as Dabru Emet states, "Jews and Christians worship the same God" and that "through Christianity hundreds of millions of people have entered into relationship with the God of Israel," why shouldn't Jews and Christians be able to worship that same God together?

The question, it seems to me, is not merely about the identity of the God to Whom the prayers are addressed. Rather, it is also about membership in the community that is uttering the prayers. Members of a religious community are not merely a random group of people who happen to be, each as an indi-vidual, covenanted to the same deity. Rather, they are covenanted to each other as well. This is why Jewish com-munal worship requires a minyan, a quorum of ten adult Jews, and why many (though not all) Christian denominations have rules about who may participate in Communion.

Many Jews and Christians believe that their covenant does not merely require them to worship God; it requires them to wor-ship God in a specific way at a specific time. Prayer that does not conform to these requirements will, indeed, seem inau-thentic to such people, even if it is done with the best of intentions and with utmost care.

"Who is my partner in the covenant?" is an unresolved issue between Jews and Christians. Those Christians who believe that Judaism is also a legitimate religion tend to use Paul's metaphors of "grafting" and "adoption" and believe that Jews and Christians are two parts of the same overall covenant. Judaism has generally held to a two-covenant model: the Covenant of Noah, which potentially embraces all humanity, and the specific covenant between God and the Jewish people, which is known as the Covenant of Abraham. The idea that Christians might also be heirs to the Covenant of Abra-ham, though in a different way than Jews, is a difficult one for many Jews to accept. Even Dabru Emet, which is the first Jewish statement about another religion to move away from Noahide language, doesn't specifically address the question of covenant. But if I am correct, that the issue of prayer involves not only the identity of the deity but membership in the cove-nant community, this may give us a clue as to why Christians often seem more eager than Jews to engage in interfaith prayer.

In recent years, many interfaith services have begun to adopt the model that Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, an expert on liturgy, calls the "Service of Mutual Affirmation." While this type of service contains some "neutral" prayers, it also makes space for specifically Jewish and specifically Christian prayers, which are meant to be said only by members of that particular com-munity. During those faith-specific prayers, the participants are not praying together, but they are coming together to pray.

For now, Christians and Jews who want to be involved in inter-faith prayer have two choices: They can opt for "neutral" prayer that fully expresses neither community's identity, or they can adopt Hoffman's "Mutual Affirmation" model, con-scious of its limitations. Liturgy that allows Jews and Christians to worship together as Jews and Christians does not yet exist.

Such a liturgy would have to follow several guidelines to have theological integrity. It should:

The fact that many Christians and Jews yearn for prayerful engagement but do not yet have the language of shared identity points to a need that is beyond our human powers to satisfy. It may be that we are bound together by a sacred discontent and an unrealized hope that we Christians and Jews may yet learn to acknowledge and affirm the integrity of the other.