Friday Dispatch: Intention for Prayer

A very special guest post

Dear readers, it is my deep and distinct joy and honor to give the floor today to my daughter. I knew before she was even conceived that she would be my teacher. Today, she gets to be yours, too.

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Friday Greetings,

Aviva here, born 22 years ago to the weekly author of this newsletter you are subscribed to, popping into your inbox as a guest writer. I’m typing from the sixth floor, from where I can look out the window and see that November has finally won the sky, which has been blue for months.

Right now, I am thinking about you. I know some of your names, few of your faces, and I feel suddenly like it is take-your-daughter-to-work day and I’m a little bit shy in front of a new audience and at the same time glad to know there are still plenty of people to meet.

Last Friday, I went to a Shabbat dinner in an apartment with tall ceilings. I arrived early to sit and read books with two small children, to run after them both for fun and also because the tall apartment was decorated with fragile things. The dinner was full of people I am just starting to get to know, many of whom know each other, most of whom I am younger than. I am not used to feeling shy, nor young; still, I show up each week, a little quieter than I expect to be but a little louder every time.

The leaders of these gatherings are the parents of the sweet children I read and run with, and I have been going to their house twice a week to babysit. They asked last Thursday if I would be willing to share some words of my own—a short intention for a prayer—at the upcoming service. The opportunity to write and share something among this group felt like the sudden presence of a small window between me and the adult life I am just starting to create, one I could not only peer through, but also be seen in.

Since moving to New York in August, I have often felt like an observer in this small community I plan to nestle into for a while, and not unhappily. There is a certain comfort in seeing without being seen. But—and these are questions I have been returning to recently—what is the cost of that comfort? What do we lose in the temporary relief of those walls? Vulnerability gives way to connection. There is no real seeing without also being seen.

(Here’s the poem I have been thinking about daily since I read it which contains the related question that feels most imperative to ask in a world that tempts us daily with convenience: What are you trying to be free of? If I guest-write again, it will be about this.)

The prayer I wrote an intention for is Mizmor l’David, Psalm of David. I spent much of my 6am commute last Friday combing through this translation:

A song of David. The L‑rd is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He causes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul; He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake.
Even as I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You set a table before me in the presence of my adversaries; You anointed my head with oil; my cup overflows.
May only goodness and kindness pursue me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the L‑rd for length of days. (chabad.org)

You would be hard-pressed to find an answer among rabbis—or any Jewish people—about whether or not prayer, or any spiritual action, requires intention in order to become meaningful. Perhaps the action itself is enough: recital for the sake of continuity, done because it has been told of us to do. Perhaps it is not. Perhaps a conscious alignment of heart and body must be made, whether in the form of a reason or simply a certain level of presence.

I will tell you that the reason that few have ever agreed on an answer is only partly because it is just so fun to keep talking about and mostly because there isn’t one.

There is no one way to set an intention or abstain from one in spiritual practice in the same way that there is no one spiritual practice. The presence of something deeply meaningful may not feel spiritual at all, and the moments we expect the most spirit are sometimes void of meaning. In all the doubt of the questions, I return time and again to the places where the grooves of both spirit and meaning have grown deep and layered: song, soft light, the weight of a small child on my lap.

Whether or not intention is always necessary—here is mine. Maybe it is the small window I see and am seen through; maybe it is a door, or a wall, or a field. I hold it in cupped hands out to you now like I did last Shabbos to a tall room full of warm people, to look at or away from, to leave or gently take:

Intention for Prayer

Where inside your body
Does Shabbat live?
The breath you hold at the top of an inhale,
The sweet catch in your throat during song?

Come, take off your shoes
The wooden doors are weightless now
The valleys as fertile as they may be dark

You are the cup that the still water of goodness pursues

At this table lush with bread and warmed by hands,
what is it that we hold?

When you sleep, may you sleep
With the blades of your back as anchors in the pasture
When you weep, savory tears for the world not yet born,
May the salt create thirst
Leading you to the next well
And when you sing, may you sing
Not only with one voice, but in time with the ancient sound
of faith
of belonging
of sustaining hope

Thank you for reading, and for having me.

Shabbat Shalom,

Aviva Lou

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