Keva’ and Kavanah:  A Tug-Of-War in Prayer

 

One Tuesday afternoon last month, I asked our 6th Grade religious school students to write down moments in their lives when they had prayed.  Silently, sitting on the floor of the Sanctuary in our weekly tefillah session, they each wrote out a note card and wrote beautiful responses.  “I prayed when my aunt was having a baby, and I wanted the baby to be OK.”  “When I get up every morning.”  “When I was in first grade, I was going on an airplane for the first time, and I was scared.”  “I prayed on Yom Kippur and asked God to forgive me – I said a silent prayer to God.”  “When my friend got lost in the forest behind the school.”  “I pray at dinner.” 

When I read them aloud anonymously, all the children listened, absorbed in hearing the real emotions and real-life experiences of their peers, expressed through moments of prayer.  Prayer is meant to elicit from us our deepest our emotions.  It is our way of expressing our innermost longings as human beings – whether we are old or young – to the Infinite Source of the Universe. 

Our 6th Graders’ prayers represent one side in a tug-of-war within Jewish prayer.  Pulling from one end is kavanah, praying with intention, with a whole heart, spontaneously and with meaning.  The students offered their prayers spontaneously, in a time of need or welling-up of emotion.  That’s kavanah.  The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, taught that without this type of kavanah, intention and spontaneity in prayer, “it is impossible to pray” (Tzava’at HaRivash #60).  But kavanah is not the only aspect of Jewish praying.  Tugging from the other end is keva’, “fixity,” praying through the fixed words, through the pattern and structure of the composed vocabulary we have inherited.  Judaism prescribes fixed times for prayer, and it developed set formulas and composition to establish a clear rhythm to our prayer life.  To pray with other community members, we need this fixity, but we also need to feel our prayers.  In Judaism, a constant balance must be maintained between these two, kavanah and keva’. 

On one hand, it is authentic to pray as a Jew with only one of either kavanah or keva’.  Recitation by rote and “speed davening”– which are pure keva’ – are, in fact, accepted forms of Jewish prayer, just as a spur-of-the-moment exclamation about the beauty of a certain field or sunset – pure kavanah – are also authentic ways of reaching out to God in prayer. 

But throughout Jewish history, rabbis recognized the importance of praying with both keva’ and kavanah together.  Prayer can become stale and boring without kavanah.  But without keva’ it is performed in isolation from community – both current and historical – and gives us no direction or guidance when we can’t quite find the words to express what we need, desire, lack, mourn or celebrate. 

Better it is to internalize the fixed words of Jewish prayer, to have them inscribed upon your heart, so that keva’ and kavanah can meet.  At any given moment of personal wonder, awe, fear, loss or hope, we might find ancient words to express our prayers and combine these two elements – kavanah finding expression in keva’.  Or, in communal prayer, to allow ourselves to be changed by the words of prayer so that keva’ can direct our kavanah.  As Rabbi Lawrence Kushner wrote: “What you need to do in order to pray is surrender your own expressions of gratitude and petition to the syntax” of the prayer book.  Here is the ultimate combination of keva’ and kavanah – no longer a tug-of-war, but a meeting of the two in the middle.

Jewish prayer can be like a script.  Just as every actor interprets Shakespeare in his or her own unique way upon the stage, we, too, can personify the ancient words of Jewish prayer to express our own unique inner prayers, differently each time we pray them.  But, as Rabbi Kushner points out, “improvisation” has a place in Jewish prayer, as we try to reach upwards and outwards – and also reach inwards – to the God who hears all human prayer.

Rabbi Andy Vogel