“Be a presence, not a performance.”

— Rabbi Sid Schwarz, Ignite Project

Every summer my paternal grandmother, a devout Orthodox Jew from the Bronx, took me on holiday to the beaches of Far Rockaway. On Shabbat morning we would stroll just two blocks from our breezy apartment to the synagogue steps—though it was less a walk than a journey to another place and time. Modeled after the grand edifices of Europe, the sanctuary was physically stunning: soaring, cathedral-like ceilings, colorful stained-glass windows, the women’s balcony above, the men’s section below. The service was scheduled to begin at nine, but on this Shabbat we arrived a full hour early. Sitting together in the silence, alone in the large empty hall, I asked her why we had come so soon. “We’ve come to pray before we pray,” she said.

I did a double take—and then it hit me. I closed my eyes and leaned softly on her shoulder, and there, in the stillness of that beautiful room, an even more sacred space had been created.

She did not explain what she meant. That is the work I have spent more than thirty years trying to do. In the cantorial school in New York, I set out not to train singers but to cultivate Jewish souls, helping each find their voice within our sacred tradition. In the Jewish day school classroom, I taught the story of Jacob wrestling with a Divine messenger and tried to create the conditions for my students to do the same. In the interfaith concert, I gathered voices from many traditions, and we discovered that our differences, sung together, made us one. At the bar mitzvah lesson, I sought to uncover the spark in each child and welcome it home into our tradition. I listened deeply to more than 300 cantors, rabbis, musicians, composers, Jewish educators, and institutional leaders, witnessing the ideas they carried, the values they lived, and the spiritual depth they had cultivated. Their wisdom now speaks through these pages.

Across all of it, I keep meeting the same mystery: emunah—faith—cannot be delivered. It can only be prepared for.

Faith does not respond to instruction. It responds to conditions—to the quality of the silence we protect, to the questions we are willing to sit inside, and to whether we are genuinely present to the person across from us. Emunah is not a subject to be taught; it is a capacity to be awakened. And awakening it in another person may be the most sacred, and least teachable, thing a Jewish educator is asked to do.

What follows are three such conditions—not a curriculum, but a way of being in the room so that the sacred has room to enter. The first is the permission to question. In our tradition, doubt is not faith’s failure but one of its oldest forms—a question is a doorway, not a dead end. The second is that prayer needs to be allowed to become real: meant, not performed. The third is accompaniment—the willingness to see what is struggling to be born in another person and to stay present until it is.

None of these can produce faith. Faith cannot be summoned on command, nor handed from one soul to another. What these conditions do is humbler, and holier: they prepare the ground in which faith may take root.

We begin with the first of them—the one that, at first hearing, sounds least like faith at all.

The Permission to Question

Doubt is not the enemy of faith. In our tradition, it is often faith’s most direct road. Abraham argues with God over Sodom. Job refuses the easy answers his friends press on him. Half the Psalms are complaints shouted upward. To question is not to stand outside the covenant; it is one of the most Jewish ways of standing inside it.

Yet we rarely teach this. We hand students answers and hope the answers will hold. Rabbi David Ingber, who founded Romemu—a neo-Hasidic-inspired Jewish community in New York City—suggests otherwise: what a teacher most needs is not certainty but the capacity to stay present inside not-knowing. He says this of training rabbis, but it is true of anyone who stands in front of a room:

You absolutely can’t divorce being comfortable with your own ambiguity and your own silence and your own darkness…from being able to model that for the community.

It does not have to be perfect, he adds, and it does not have to be tight. What students catch from us is rarely our answers; it is our ease inside the questions we cannot close.

This is the first condition we create in a classroom: a room where “I’m not sure I believe this” is heard as the beginning of faith, not its failure—where doubt is given a place at the table rather than corrected away.

I watched this happen with one of my fourth graders. Asked to create a midrash—her own interpretation of a verse from the Torah—she drew a forest of trees with frightened faces because, she explained, when we are alone our minds make things “seem more scary than they actually are.”

But she did not stop at the fear.

Above the dark woods, she set a black portal with God looking down through it—a watchful presence even where the child in the picture could not yet see it. And winding back out of the trees, she drew footsteps in rainbow colors: hope, she seemed to be saying, is not out ahead of us but behind us—a trail we leave without realizing, visible only when we turn around.

I had not asked her to resolve the darkness or explain why God had permitted it. I had simply given her room to stay with the mystery. No lesson of mine put the faith there. The assignment gave her permission to draw the fear; the faith showed up on its own, inside it.

The questions themselves are holy. Sometimes the asking is the answer.

Where questioning is forbidden, students learn to perform belief. Where it is welcomed, they can begin to build the real thing.

Prayer as Genuine Encounter

There is a difference between making the sound of prayer and praying. I have spent my life on the cantor’s side of that line, and I can tell you that the line is real—and that students feel which side of it you are standing on long before they could name it.

Cantor Ilan Davidson found the line by crossing back over it. He had been a professional opera singer—concert halls, high notes, applause—and he was miserable. “I couldn’t find my soul inside the way I was making it,” he says.

He walked away, returned to Israel, and stumbled into the cantorial tradition almost by accident. Something changed in his body. “When I opened my mouth to sing the prayers, it wasn’t ‘me’ performing for ‘them.’ It was prayer.”

Years later, he can name what the opera house never taught him: “The cantor should be more of a listener than a singer.”

And, most surprising of all: “Sometimes the most faithful thing I can do is stop singing and let silence become the prayer.”

You do not need a beautiful voice to cross that line. Rabbi Jonathan Slater remembers his father in synagogue—a reserved man who could not speak about his inner life, who “didn’t have a great voice” and did not know all the cantillation, but who sang anyway, “off-key, earnest, unselfconscious,” a beat ahead of the cantor, leaning into the melodies with everything he had. “That,” Slater says, “was where he told the truth about himself.”

Sometimes a prayer is so fully meant that it crosses the boundary in which it was born. Two weeks after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the readings at the installation of a priest happened to include the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy—the Shema. Bishop Joseph Brennan hesitated; it was not his prayer to pray. “How could we not only refer to it,” he told me, “but somehow pray it, lift it up?”

So he found a setting and sang it. Joan Vos, a sacred music regional director who was there, remembers the sight: the bishop on his knees, his back to his own congregation, facing the altar and the cross, singing Israel’s oldest declaration of faith for a grieving people not his own.

What stays with me is what he did after. “Ever since that horrible thing happened in Pittsburgh,” he said, “I’ve been praying it and singing it, just in my own heart of hearts.” No congregation, no occasion—just a borrowed prayer, meant.

In each of these moments, the prayer is no longer a performance. Something true comes through.

My own students tell me as much, in their own way. When I surveyed my fourth graders about prayer this spring, more than one of them reached for the very same words to describe it: “It’s impossible to explain.”

They were not dodging the question. They were being honest—naming the truth that something in prayer outruns the words we hand them to say.

In the classroom, this is the second condition: we do not ask children merely to perform prayer. We can teach children the words and melodies, but we cannot assume that saying them correctly means they have prayed. We try to make a room—and to model a presence—in which prayer can occasionally be meant.

A single prayer meant once teaches more than a hundred recited correctly.

Accompaniment

The third condition is the hardest to teach and the easiest to feel: the willingness to see what is trying to emerge in another person before they can see it themselves, and to stay present until it does.

Rabbi Sid Schwarz walked into a hospital room to visit a woman facing surgery she might not survive. He came, he says, “to do what rabbis do in hospital rooms”—and felt at once that she did not need it. “She needed me to be a human being, not a religious functionary.” So he set the role down, told her the truth gently and plainly, and stayed in the fear with her. What he learned there captures the essence of accompaniment, and is distilled in the four words (in Hebrew) that open this essay, drawn from the laws of comforting mourners: “Be a presence, not a performance.”

Transformation, he says, “happens when you’re willing to feel a fraction of what the other person is feeling.” The setting was a hospital room, but I have found the same to be true in a classroom. Before offering what I think a student needs, I have to notice what is actually happening in front of me. This is not reserved for deathbeds. The dancer and Jewish educator Jody Falk traces her entire vocation to a single question a high-school teacher once asked the whole class on an ordinary day. “She wasn’t trying to change my life,” Falk says. “She was just present. She was paying attention. And her attention created a kind of space—enough space for something true to appear.”

The posture has a name in our tradition. Cantor Gaston Bogomolni, describing his years of visiting an elderly Holocaust survivor he came to love, put it this way: “I wanted to reach out to her heart and her soul… We don’t charge for what we see. We want to really reach out to the deepest part of that person, because they’re holding a treasure.”

It is, quietly, a statement about tzelem Elokim—the image of God present in every human being. To recognize the treasure another person is holding is to encounter the holy. The treasure is not ours. Our task is simply to recognize that it is there and give it room to emerge.

In a classroom, accompaniment looks like noticing what a student is reaching for and refusing to rush it—listening before responding and protecting the quiet moment long enough for something to emerge.

Demonstrated, Not Transmitted

Permission to question. Prayer as encounter. Accompaniment.

None of them is a technique. They are ways of being present—ways of making room for something we cannot manufacture ourselves. Because here is the truth underneath all three: emunah is not, in the end, transmitted. It is demonstrated—revealed in what we cannot help showing about what we believe.

Rabbi Jonathan Slater says it of his own father—the same man we met in synagogue, telling the truth about himself in a voice that was never trained for it. That man, Slater told me, “didn’t have language really to talk about his spiritual life.” A European who lived through the end of the war and knew the Shoah, he carried questions about the God he grew up with and never fully set them down. And yet, Slater says, “whatever else he knew, his fundamental trust in and commitment to honesty, integrity, and goodness—that was he.” The synagogue, for such a man, was simply “a place his heart showed up even if he couldn’t talk about it.”

Perhaps that is the whole of it: a life full of unspoken questions, and a faith revealed not through theology, but through the simple fact that his heart kept showing up. We teach faith least through what we say about it, and most through what we cannot hide.

Which is why I have come to trust children on this subject more than theologians. We ready the ground; they show us what grows in it. During a classroom conversation about how we come to know God, I asked my students where, if anywhere, they sensed God’s presence in their own lives. One boy paused for a long moment, then said something that stopped me cold—a single sentence I have never forgotten: “I know He is real — because He created such awesome parents for me.”

I could not have taught him that. No one could. His parents had not argued him into belief. Through their love, they had made God’s goodness feel real to him. They had shown him, simply by the way they loved him, something worth believing in.

Closeness—to God, to one another, to the tradition—cannot be demanded. We can only make room for it. Our work is to prepare the conditions. The rest arrives, or does not, in its own time.

Pray Before We Pray

I told my grandmother’s story to my own fourth graders this year. I did not explain it. I did what she had done: I set it down in the room and let the silence around it do the rest. In the last days of the school year, a note came back to me from one of them, a boy named Arthur: “Dear Cantor Ken, thank you for being my 4th grade teacher. I loved hearing stories about you when you were younger and praying before praying.”

Out of an entire year, that was the phrase he kept—and handed back to me. I had not taught it to him any more than my grandmother had taught it to me. I had only made room for it. Somewhere between her empty sanctuary and his note, the same small truth had traveled, intact, by the only means it ever travels: not transmitted, but demonstrated; not delivered, but prepared for.

I think of that fourth grader’s rainbow footsteps—hope visible only when you turn around. From where I stand now, I can see the trail behind me: my grandmother, and then me, and now Arthur—who may one day arrive somewhere an hour early, sit down in the quiet, and know, without being told, that the prayer has already begun.