In the Rabbinic corpus the prayerbook is perhaps the most intertextual and the most portable of the texts in the portable library established by the Rabbis. Indeed, the prayerbook itself produces increased intertextuality and it intensifies the very quality of portability so crucial to the Diaspora Judaism that is emerging between the end of the first century and up though the sixth century.

The complex intertextuality of the prayerbook is sometimes deceptively hidden to those who pray it. In its enactment as praying, through the flow and rhythm of its melodies, in the ways that the different parts speak to and echo one another, a sense of unity is established that makes the whole more than even the sum if its parts, indeed a whole that conceals these parts.

The prayer book is something of a living, organic text, and one that keeps growing along with the people of Israel. Like the Bible which is composed over a period of generations, incorporating new strata that are made to feel ancient, so too the prayerbook incorporates its different elements--Biblical material, Rabbinic legal and aggadic passages, medieval poetry, mystical elements--in an almost seamless way, producing something holistic and unified out of such varied material.

The prayerbook, even more than the Bible, can be regarded as a spiritual autobiography of the Jewish people, one that captures and expresses collective sentiments, even as it shapes the sentiments of individual Jews and Jewish communities. As cultural historians we can isolate many Judaisms, though at any given moment only one (true) Judaism is experienced by the person enacting a Judaism. So too, the prayerbook can be analyzed almost archaeologically to reveal its many contested sites and very different forms of prayer. But in its praying this service of many parts Judaism itself get stitched together into the single Judaism of the one who prays.

As one reads through the section of the morning service and the Haggadah you have been assigned, be sure to read the notes that locate the variety of sources that make up the prayerbook. In so doing one can see the ways that a text from the Bible or the Mishnah, which in another setting might be studied, is here prayed. Two very different sorts of texts--ones to be studied and ones to be prayed--form the central weave of the prayerbook. Yet even the study texts, when located within the prayerbook, become prayer texts.

In prayer, the content of the words, their syntactical meanings, are secondary to the milieu they evoke and the mood that they produce, an atmosphere dictated as much by the accompanying melodies as the words themselves. Prayer becomes meaningful not as information, not as units of meaning conveyed by the words. Prayer is meaningful in the ways that it is efficacious in establishing a prayerful experience, a heightened sense of mindfulness that the Rabbis called kavanah. In this state, sometimes poorly translated as "inwardness," better understood as intention, and best understood as an alertness in the one who prays as she becomes open to the possibility of encountering the divine presence.

In study--even in the highly ritualized study which Heilman will describe in the next Unit--the meanings of words are crucial. In prayer, such dwelling on meanings of words can sometimes interrupt the flow of prayer and subvert the very moods that they can establish when prayed.

An example: It seems that contemporary rabbis cannot resist explaining what they are doing in one or another prayer performance, often punctuating a prayer service with some observations about the origins of a prayer, the reasons for some liturgical gesture and other learned information that might enlighten intellectually the congregation but more often than not undermines the power of the praying to accomplish its much more affective agenda. It would be as if the actors in a play stepped out of their roles and commented on stage direction, some differences of interpretation of a line, or otherwise broke the very spell that a performance of words can cast.

This is a point made by Sam Gill in his account of Navajo prayer (Sacred Words) when he argues "[t]hat prayer serves much more than a conveyance of ordinary messages requires no proof. The sound, the setting, and the occasion of prayer are distinctive and signal that the act being performed is an act of prayer. The act is thus framed in the minds of those present so that they are prepared to receive it as an experience of prayer. They do not engage in debate about the compatibility of the language of prayer and their ordinary understanding of the empirically known world. The symbolic aspects of the language of prayer are not measured against the encyclopedic knowledge of the empirical world and dismissed because they do not fit."

Thus does the prayer service, despite the tendency of modern rabbis to turn prayer into study, camouflage a piece of Mishnah or a long biblical passage and render them as just another prayer to be chanted. What might be assimilated slowly through the study of a Mishnah, like the one we introduced from Mishnah Peah which promotes study, and prayer, and socially responsible acts of lovingkindness can be transmitted subliminally, yet even more directly in proper praying, that is, the only prayer that counted according to the Rabbis, namely prayer with the intensity of kavanah.

Thus the prayerbook is an intertext of different voices and parts, sections of study texts and sections of prayer texts, but clearly its agenda is praying, and the learning that is accomplished in it is not some intellectual sort, but one much more laden with affects and much more emotionally charged.

As an example of an intertext we can say that the genre of prayer reproduces itself, and the ever-expanding prayerbook testifies to its success in such reproduction. Prayer begets more prayers. As opposed to the other two primary Jewish texts, the Bible and the Talmud, the prayerbook has never been closed, and while those texts are sustained though new interpretation, the prayerbook grows by increments of replication.

Prayer also, as we have been insisting, begets praying, in this case a reproduction in the form of an enactment. And praying is a powerfully present bound, living experience. If an intertext, like the Bible is supposed to, as Bruns has it, "address itself to the time of its interpretation," and constantly be appropriated anew, then this book is an ideal intertext which can become alive in each present enactment.

The presentness of the one who prays is matched by present-bound actions of the one prayed to, a divinity, who "renews the creation every day" ( Daily Prayerbook, p. 74. Mintz notes that "Creation-revelation-redemption are presented not just as 'events' located in a mythic past or the future, but also as 'processes' ongoing within the life of the individual and the people." Not only are these three events understood in prayer as ongoing and ever-present, but all the prayers locate God as the one who is doing the actions in a continuing present: "He forms light and creates darkness" (p. 72), he "creates lights" (p. 74), "He chooses his people Israel in love, " (p. 76)." Thus does the prayerbook provide the performer with a syntax that favors the present tense for almost all the divine acts.

A similar emphasis on the present is even more dramatically announced and performed in the Seder service for which the Haggadah serves as the liturgical prompt. The Haggadah enacts the command, "Remember this day," Zachor et ha-yom ha-zeh (Ex. 13:3), and the subsequent command ""And you shall tell your son that day," Ve-higadeta le-vincha- ba-yom ha-hu (vs. 8) by producing sons who ask questions about the rituals performed on Passover Eve (see p. 9)

All know t already the answers to the questions (for the questions come even before the actions are performed), but nevertheless the Biblical account of the Exodus told through the midrashic glosses on the Biblical texts is re-told as if for the first time: "For even if all of us were wise, all of us learned, all of us elder sages, it would be a command for us to tell the account of the exodus from Egypt" (Haggadah, p.10).

For this is no mere history lesson. Rather its is the existentializing of memory, the re-living of the event of the past right here in the present: "In every generation a person must see himself as if he himself went out of Egypt, as it is says, 'And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, "It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt." ' There is no better example of the Bible addressing "itself to the time of interpretation," of it being appropriated anew as Bruns has it in his essay. Here prayer service, interpretation, and ritual performance are joined to make the present moment the virtual enactment of a past event. Like the other rituals and laws we have been studying, prayer and praying establish and mark time, only more so. It is as much the evening prayers, the morning service, the afternoon liturgy that create these zones of time than the very rotation of the sun around the earth. The new moon (in a lunar calendar) is not new until it is ritually so declared. The interval of Sabbath between the ordinary days of a waning week and the waxing of a new one is produced by inaugurating rituals of lighting candles and sanctifying the wine, just as it will not end until a ceremony of dividing holy from ordinary time (the havdalah) which is chanted some twenty four hours later. Prayers are what the philosophers would call speech acts. They do not merely mark time, they make time.

Prayer does many of the things that are accomplished by the other rituals of Judaism, the ritualized mitzvoth, but here again, perhaps in an even more felicitous manner because of the fact that prayer is something that is more affective than cognitive. Thus it has a very special capacity to heighten the moment, to transform something ordinary into the extraordinary in something of an ordinary way, that is, by merely saying/chanting words. Prayer is a favored way of producing holiness in the midst of the profane, elevating the most quotidian of activities into sacramental actions. The goal of prayer, like the other rituals, is a mindfulness of divine ordering of the created world, an awareness that opens up each moment, extends the present for the very length of the prayer that is recited.

There are prayers for all occasions, as we have seen--blessings over all sorts of foods, blessings for hearing thunder and seeing lightening, even blessings for the routine of awakening in the morning, now incorporated at the beginning of the morning service. These introductory blessings might have originally been recited at home, and there is something so homey, so ordinary about the moments they celebrate.

As one hears the cock crow the prayer recited is "Blessed are You, our Lord, King of the universe who has given the cock understanding to discern between day and night." And upon opening ones eyes one praises God "opening the eyes of the blind," and as one dresses for "clothing the naked" and even as one takes care of private toilet needs there is a prayer here also, and so on as one begins anew the day as if it were the first day of creation.

Like the other intertexts we have been discussing, the liturgy presents contested views of prayer itself. Most of what we have been describing here are the forms of prayer that dominate within early Rabbinic Judaism which produce a kind of hovering consciousness on the a divinely ordered creation, a focusing on the here and now of the ordinary world, an awakening to "today/this day."

But the liturgy has a number of sites in which mystical Judaism intrudes on this rather non-mystical, even anti-mystical Judaism. Boyarin has already alluded to R. Akiba's possible martyr's, self-sacrificing "mystic death" (as he calls it) in which eros and thanatos are fused into an ecstatic vision of bliss with God. (see pp. 127-28 of Intertextuality…).

Though Boyarin argues that the source of the vision would have been Akiba's life in Midrash, he knows that the real sources would more likely have been the earliest of Jewish mysticisms attributed to Akiba and his colleagues. Some of this mysticism, almost esoterically and certainly without calling attention to itself, works itself into the prayerbook in the Kedushah Service (see p. 84). Here the human performers of the service are not only singing the words of praise attributed to angels in two Biblical texts (Isaiah and Ezekiel), they are reminded of the possibility of transformation into a celestial being as is described in early ecstatic texts. For the one familiar with the Merkabah mysticism of the Rabbinic period, these words echo visionary mystical/magical words through which humans achieve temporary loss of ordinary consciousness, a case of dramatic self-loss, and are transformed in the angelic flaming hosts that surround the divine throne.

You will be reading in Scholem's chapter on mystical rituals of some other points in the liturgy where temporary ecstatic fusion with the divinity is promoted. And a much later Hasidic teaching would argue that far from prayer enhancing awareness in the self of the divinely created (natural) world, the goal of a more meditative prayer is that the mystic be "so absorbed in prayer that he is no longer aware of his own self. There is nothing for him but the flow of Life [that is, fusion with divine spiritual energy]; all his thoughts are with God. He who still knows how intensely he is praying," the teaching concludes, "has not yet overcome the bonds of self."

Now such self-liquidation which has its mystical sites in the prayerbook, is overshadowed by just a kind of self and world awareness that we have suggested is the more dominant, though perhaps only exoteric--that is, the public face of--Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism. The self-aware, discerning Jew, the one who has the capacity to distinguish and separate, is what we might call the default position of Biblical and rabbinic Judaism. Yet within these rabbinic texts a contesting voice can be heard, certainly one eclipsed by a more dominant Judaism, yet nevertheless quite present.

In the two Judaisms we have so far studied an aware self might predominate, though such an individual identity is still secondary to a more significant social identity. And it is in prayer that social identity can absorb the individual, shape her, and set social limits on the self. Here the neutralization of that self is not so much by a fusion with the divinity as the Jewish mystics would have it, but through an identity with the prayers themselves. We might be so bold as to say that it is not so much that person who says the prayer as the prayer that gets said through the person.

Prayers of course get shaped by individuals--there are always new melodies being invented, and there are certainly different kinds of intentions for and understandings of the prayers and praying itself. Yet I would suggest that it is the person who is shaped by the prayer more than the reverse. The individual person, in the act of praying at least, is but an instrument for prayer and the prayerbook. It seems so fitting that the siddur is, like the Bible, by and large, an anonymous work. The narrators/composers is sufficiently impersonal so that any person praying can take it for her own and assume the identity of the prayer itself.

Seen from another angel, we might say that the if there is any kind of self-loss here, it is the subordination of the self to the community, the sense that a self only emerges in connection with other selves, the teaching and the enacting of a religion which is wary of independence and favors the kinds of interdependence that would allow Judaism to survive its exile.

In this sense we can call praying--particularly the favored form of praying with the quorum of at least 10 persons-- a collectivizing experience. Prayer is the occasion for community, it is the crucial instrument for acquiring the sentiments of the community, it is a moment in which the community expresses as one its central values of prayer, study, and social responsibility.

Now this might appropriately describe prayer in Rabbinic Judaism. But when we turn to Scholem's account of Jewish mysticism, we will encounter a radically different Judaism, a radically different goal for prayer, an esoteric Judaism that emerges out of the heart of Rabbinic Judaism. In this mysticism not only will the mystical sites of the prayerbook come alive in all their mystical possibilities, but even the least mystical sections will be transformed by a upspringing of just the more mythological consciousness that the Bible and the rabbis struggled to suppress.