Shabbat Sulam: The Lab and Ladder
Although we often use these weekly letters to delve into Torah with you, this week I wanted to share about prayer instead. One of my teachers of prayer, Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, once told this story in an interview:
When I was younger and I was a rabbinic student, I had this great teacher who was reputed to know absolutely everything. Absolutely everything. And his name was Dr. Tepfer, alav ha-shalom. Came from England. He had this British accent so you could believe he knew everything.
So at one point, I don’t know why, I said to him I wanted to learn Yiddish. I think because I knew my grandmother spoke Yiddish and I had forgotten it. And I wanted to learn it again. I said to him, ‘Could you teach me Yiddish,’ since he knew everything. And he said to me, ‘Yiddish, Hoffman?’ He said to me, ‘You don’t teach Yiddish. You just open your mouth and it comes out.’ He was wrong of course, but that’s the attitude people have to prayer. You just open your mouth and it comes out. But actually, it doesn’t. It’s an art form and it takes the people who are involved, each at their own level, to come together and make it work in a group.
Tonight we will begin a new iteration of Kabbalat Shabbat, the Friday night liturgy, at Kavana. We are calling it Shabbat Sulam (“ladder”). And it can best be described as “experimenting with tradition”, in two different ways: the lab and the ladder. Our goal will be to make it work as a group, to center our Kavana values of co-creation and being producers, not consumers, of Judaism.
The Lab
Kavana partner Miriam Blau and I have just started a two-year-long cohort with Joey Weisenberg called The River of Song. Joey has become one of the leading teachers of prayer and communal singing, through Mechon Hadar and his Rising Song Institute (and some of you have learned with him before or know his music!).
Kabbalat Shabbat, while used for Friday night prayers as a whole, also refers specifically to the first part of the service, the series of psalms and poems like Lecha Dodi that precede the usual evening service, which is called Maariv. At Shabbat Sulam this year, let’s consider this section a KabShabLab, leaning traditional but prioritizing depth of singing and connection to the liturgy over breadth. Each month we may flow in slightly different ways, attending to the richness of the psalms and the spiritual nourishment they offer. Our experimentation with the tradition will be in service of you finding your prayer voice, with all of us crafting something meaningful and moving together. Experimenting with tradition as our partner…
Whatever you do, do not expect a fully baked experience. This is by design, because not all the cooks are in the kitchen yet (that’s you!).
The Ladder
For maariv, we won’t experiment on tradition, nor with tradition as inspiration, but by means of tradition, sticking more closely to the traditional meditative mode of davening. For some of us, simply being in traditional prayer is an experiment! What provokes curiosity? What moves you? What barriers come up for you, and how might you work through them? What do you want to learn?
Both for maariv in particular and for the whole service, the metaphor of a ladder, a sulam, speaks both to what we are doing and how we are doing it.
Each of the prayers functions as a rung, helping us elevate (or deepen) step by step. The act of singing itself is considered climbing a ladder. (Joey Weisenberg describes it here.) Sulam in Hebrew means ladder, but it also means a musical scale.
But crucially, each person needs to own their own journey. It doesn’t happen automatically - prayer isn’t just going to come spilling out of our mouths. Nor can someone else climb the ladder on our behalf. Each of us within the group has our own part to do. Each of us must find our rung, and take the next step.
In an old story attributed to Rebbe Schneerson, the rebbe told the student about a ladder on which someone was on a lower rung, and someone was on a higher rung. He asked the student, “Who is closer to their goal?” The student thought obviously the person higher up, but the rebbe shook his head and said, “It depends which way they are going.”
Each of us has our own rung, and perhaps our own ladder, but our ladders don’t even have the same rungs, and certainly not the same rungs in the same order! And we may not even be going in the same direction. What matters is finding the next right rung for you - and it isn’t always easy. The amount of prayers, the pace of the service, the melodies or structure or choreography of prayer, let alone the meaning of individual prayers, Hebrew language, theology, and more, all of these come up as barriers at one point or another. Perhaps your rung is to get a little more comfortable with Hebrew. Perhaps it's learning to drum. Perhaps it’s leading ma’ariv next month, or exploring one of the psalms with a friend.
I too am a learner-leader, figuring out the next right rung to climb in my Jewish practice. My hope this year is to create a Kabbalat Shabbat service with you that can be a place of openness and skill-building, a place of experimentation and tradition, a lab and a ladder.
“And Jacob dreamt, and there was a sulam (ladder) standing on the ground, with its head touching the sky, and behold: God’s angels were going up and down.” (Genesis 28:12)
Shabbat shalom!
Rabbi Jay LeVine
