Hillel Broder introduced meditative tefillah into an Orthodox high school and documented student reaction. He shares with us both his practice and research.

Introduction

Although students at Orthodox schools typically spend about 10% of their academic day engaged in prayer, educators and social critics have only recently articulated how little curricular attention is brought to regular tefillah on a secondary tefillah. In the introduction to the Spring 2013 Hayidion, editor Barbara Davis introduced the evident challenge in Jewish day schools: all of the issue’s authors struggle with the fact that “prayer in school is often rote, devoid of meaning, emotionless, irrelevant to the pray-ers.” (p. 4) Chana Tanenbaum (2013) notes how only 16.4% “of all respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the event [of tefillah] is spiritually uplifting, while in contrast, 20% of the same group found participation in a sports team to be fairly or extremely meaningful to their religious growth.” (p. 22)

At SAR High School, where I have taught tefillah for the past five years, the only mandated expectation is regular student attendance. Student participation, therefore, varies based on students’ interest in volunteering. And as a modern Orthodox high school, very few opportunities exist for female students to play an active role leading prayer. Thus, in the overtly ritual and minimally pedagogical space of an unexamined prayer curriculum, positive student interest is either inherited or intangible.

In response, SAR administration and faculty piloted an alternative tefillah program as part of its experiential, yearlong theme of dveykut (devotional religious practice). Following the success of its experimental pilot, SAR integrated regular alternative options alongside the standard, traditional tefillah to capitalize on diverse Hebrew and siddur literacies, varied student interests and passions, and an overwhelming demand for opportunities for women’s prayer leadership. My alternative shaharit seemed to break unprecedented ground, as I was unaware of any Orthodox prayer service structured to serve the needs of mindfulness and contemplation in another Orthodox synagogue or school.

This paper presents the findings of written exit surveys collected over the course of four years from students who elected to join my group for a six to eight week interval. I found that most students characterized their general relationship with tefillah as negative, whereas most sought opportunities, following their meditation tefillah intensive, to integrate practices of meditation into their conventional tefillah and school lives. Additionally, almost all students who self-reported found the meditation tefillah practice useful for mental health and wellbeing.

Methodology

In thinking about what is necessary in an alternative prayer experience, I follow James Jacobson- Maisels’ critique of Jewish prayer education’s status quo, in that he articulates both a challenge and a solution that I have substantiated and deepened in my own case study. Jacobson-Maisels (2013) identifies the pedagogical challenge as one that is deeply seated in “insufficient and misguided prayer education.”

This is seen initially in its focus on skills and the siddur rather than on the transformative power of prayer itself as a spiritual practice. While skills and knowledge of the siddur are undoubtedly important and essential building blocks in developing a prayer life, they are not sufficient to make prayer meaningful and important to students and for them to create a continuing relationship to prayer throughout their lives. (p. 18)

Instead of stressing the skills-based standards for prayer education, Maisels suggests that the key to shifting education around prayer has to do with recasting it as a “goal oriented practice” in which prayer is taught as a “transformative and meaningful spiritual practice.” This demands that educators embrace prayer’s spiritual component and potential by teaching “prayer as a technique to cultivate certain emotions, dispositions and ways of being in the world.” (p. 18)

In addition to the necessity of personalizing prayer by way of spiritual practice, I assume the distinct developmental nature of God awareness and prayer abstraction unique to adolescence. Scarlett and Perriello (1991) argue that during adolescence, prayer shifts from functioning as a means to sway God’s will towards more as a means to cope with difficult feelings, negotiate better wishes, and foster a feeling of closeness to God. Their argument is founded on various schools of developmental psychology, all of which suggest that there are likely three stages of prayer development from early adolescence to adulthood. First, in middle-school, students request of God to change reality; later, in early to mid-high school, students request of God to change their feelings in response to reality; finally, in late high school and early college years, students pray by negotiating with and even wrestling with their faith in God.

In what follows, I offer the protocols of meditation tefillah, sharing the vision, curriculum, practices, and general goals of this particular alternative tefillah. Following these protocols, I share reflections culled from four years of qualitative data collected from student participants in meditation tefillah, and I close by drawing inferences and reasonable observations from the student data, with certain recommendations for consideration.

Protocols: Setting

The group met on the topmost floor, facing floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a vast park and sunrise on the horizon. The vision of sky, clouds, birds, and forest set the still and magnificent tone for the tefillah, and so all chairs were arranged facing the floor-toceiling glass east-facing windows, with a wheeled mehitzah separating the boys and girls.

Because the prayer space was in a classroom, every day demanded a new assembly and dis-assembly to meet the unique needs of this space, and so a primary and introductory teaching, of the prayer space, was to “leave no trace” – an environmentally sound ethic and spiritual teaching in its own right. Students were active participants in arranging the space – requiring an elbow’s length of distance from their colleagues reflecting the independent and individual experience and nature of this practice.

Although I sat at the front of the room facing the students, visible by both girls and boys, students took ownership – by arranging the space, maintaining silence while entering the space, and even in self-monitoring attendance, building a culture of trust. They were instructed to place their phones beneath their chairs to keep their minds still and focused, and boys were expected to put tefillin on before tefillah begins. Failure to sign in or to wrap tefillin was addressed in a private conversation outside of the prayer space, not during or within it, to best maintain the atmosphere and focus.

By sharing in the setup of their environment, students were primed to respond to the subsequent instruction of respect for and devotion to the ritual of prayer, all through guided instruction around mindful intention in breath, utterance, and movement. In this way, the practice of prayer became a singularly spiritual, independent, and devotional act as much as it was a shared communal one, as mirrored in their intentional environmental assembly.

Protocols: Teaching intentional prayer

Prior to electing to participate, students read a “course description” of the meditation tefillah, which detailed a variety of mind and body practices both embedded in their tradition and universally shared. Furthermore, per the school’s instruction, the session fulfilled the bare minimum of a halakhic tefillah per Tur Shulhan Arukh’s teaching of, “Better a little with concentration than much without concentration” (Orah Hayyim 1:1). Adopting this assumption created time for students to be introduced to a variety of meditation practices, including intentional silence, mindfulness, and guided Jewish mystical meditations.

Initially, the course utilized the lens of “fours.” The four movements of shaharit – birkhot hashahar (morning blessings); pesukei dezimra (verses of song); birkhot keriat shema (blessings of Shema); Amidah (the silent benediction) were layered onto various structures of ascensions of four that generally appear in traditional and mystical Jewish thought: the four levels of the soul discussed in various kabbalistic texts; four levels of the mystical realms in Jewish mysticism; four letters of God’s ineffable name. Later, meditation tefillah as both a body and deep listening practice was included. Students were reminded daily that most of the meditations exercised were body practices, practices that demanded their conscious attention to a movement or stillness of the body. As such, I suggested to them that they might find a greater clarity or focus in the same texts and movements of their traditional, deeply familiar, prayer practice.

The daily session lasted no more than 40 minutes. The morning prayers opened with the teacher’s slow and standing recitation of birkhot hashahar, which served as the opening “bell. or call to attention, reinforced with the students’ amen response to each blessing. Birkhot hashahar ended with a brief silence, as students waited for what was next. The striking contrast between the sound of prayer and the following silence was an essential component of creating this tefillah space.

The first, usually seated meditation that followed every morning was loosely based on what is termed mindfulness meditation, in which students were talked slowly through slow breathing, body relaxation, and mindful stillness. The goal of this experience was to calm the students’ minds before they embarked into the textual and spoken realm of prayer, while emphasizing the deep attentiveness and personal awareness cultivated through mindful listening. One key text integrated into this teaching was the reading of a paragraph from the introduction to Rabbi A.Y.

Kook’s Olat Re’iya, where he writes that one of the prerequisites for proper prayer is quieting the mind to attend to the soul’s natural and perpetual activity of constant prayer:

Tefillah is only wholesome when it arises from the idea that in truth the soul is always praying. She [the prayer of the soul] flies and embraces her lover without any break or separation. At the moment of actual prayer the perpetual soul-prayer is revealed in action. (p.1.

Ideally, students were told, they would integrate this “soul-prayer” into their scripted, textual prayers. In their seats and with this teaching, students then took five minutes to direct their attention to their posture, breath, mind, and “soul prayer” in order to follow the Mishnaic dictum (Berakhot 5:1) that the original pietists would sit for a moment before praying.

In what follows, I offer an outline of what the typical instruction and guidance for seated mindfulness:

Posture: Sit on the edge of your seats in an upright posture, hands free resting on your knees; make sure that your knees extend from their chairs at 90 degree angles, and that your backs draw a straight line from your heads’ crown to your seat. Don’t slouch or lean on the back of the chair. Have your senses attentive but stilled; you might notice the sounds of students in the hallway or the cars outside – simply listen to those sounds.

Breath: Sitting as still as possible, draw your attention to your nose and belly, and the way that the breath is warmed in your nose and causes your stomach to expand and contract. Take a few deep breaths, counting to three on each inhale and exhale.

Mind: Watch the parade of your thoughts and remember your posture and breath. As your thoughts and feelings rise, simply watch them. (Note: becoming the watcher and not the thinker is a central one for not resisting, but simply noticing, acknowledging, and even welcoming what arises.)

Prayer: As your thoughts become fewer and further between, listen deeply to the activity of their souls. What emerges? What feelings, desires, or emotions begin to rise? Notice the deep prayers of your soul. This heard prayer will fuel the articulated prayers to be spoken as you proceed through the siddur.

After five minutes of this guided and then silent meditation instruction, students silently prayed pesukei dezimra (without interruption by the hazzan), while I reminded them that their sole task was to maintain the pristine silence of the space and to ensure that, as they pray, they did not lose their breath.

Occasionally, pesukei dezimra, was interrupted by a mystical Shiviti visualization, during which, having quieted their minds, they brought into focus in their minds’ eye the four letters of God’s ineffable name: Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh. They were then instructed to visualize the first Yud of the name passing through the void of the first Heh, down the length of the Vav, and then through the final Heh. Such a meditation is sourced in the Rabbi Joseph Gikatalia’s Sha’arei Orah and later popularized in Aryeh Kaplan’s Meditation and Kabbalah (1982).

When students reached Barekhu, guidance and then practice of intentional standing and then bowing – both taught and then only referenced – framed the prayer. Students were taught how to stand still at this moment in a simple yogic mountain pose; then, they were guided through bowing as a spiritual technique, and finally they were introduced to the Talmud’s description of bowing in prayer as extending all vertebrae and straightening up, arching one’s back like a snake (Berakhot 28b). They practiced standing still and bowing as critical motions in the tefillah process, and were briefly instructed about the value of mindful standing or swaying by way of referencing historical precedents for both practices during traditional prayer.

Barekhu until Shema was said in total silence. Shema was emphasized as the cornerstone of contemplative practice and spiritual understanding, and over the course of the two month sessions, students were prompted to focus on the following intentions:

1. listening deeply to God’s oneness,
2. knowing this oneness through the experience of being chosen out of love (the theme of the blessing that precedes Shema),
3. knowing that this knowledge of God’s oneness and God’s love inspires a reciprocal love of commitment, in return (the recitation of Ve’ahavta),
4. understanding that Shema is listening to both multiplicity and unity, to the name that is 70 (shin-mem-ayin) and the name that is one (ehad),
5. practicing listening techniques, as prescribed by Sefer Yetzirah, by repeating the opening sounds of shin and mem (warm and cooling vibrations) in the form of deep breathing, and
6. practicing contemplative mantra techniques – in a callresponse repetitive chanting of the entire verse of Shema.

Following one of the above kavvanot, students proceeded quietly through Shema and regrouped, standing in a stilled pose before the Amidah. At this point, students were reminded to maintain focus on posture, breath, and thoughts as they again practiced intentional standing and bowing, and were instructed to stand as still as possible and to maintain this posture throughout the Amidah. This stilled standing posture encouraged a comparable thought posture, and the joint paradox of assertion and surrender, were then stressed as the key dispositions that might emerge while reciting the Amidah.

Following the Amidah (and kedushah recited together in the third berakhah), students had a few minutes to conclude their tefillah, after which they quietly restored the room to its original setting.

Findings

After each session students completed a comprehensive survey regarding their experience before, during, and after the unit. The survey focused on the following relationship- and narrative-driven questions:

1. What is your relationship with tefillah, in general?
2. Which practices of meditation did you find meaningful or effective? Why?
3. Can you describe the feeling of sitting through a meditation tefillah?
4. Did you arrive at any realizations about yourself, tefillah, or God through meditating?

Between Fall 2013 and Spring 2017 I conducted ten exit surveys involving close to 300 students. I have excerpted responses from 50 students over the years as a rhetorical sampling. Twenty out of fifty students characterized their general relationship with tefillah prior to their meditation tefillah as generally negative – not participating, resisting tefillah, etc. “It is a struggle for me during the regular prayers to feel connected and to only concentrate on the prayers that are given.” Others described standard tefillah, as “robotic and tedious,” or a “burden.” At least twenty characterized tefillah as an average or neutral experience; only five described their experience as positive and engaging.

Regarding the particular practice, exercise, or instruction that was most meaningful during meditation tefillah, respondents all used positive language indicating calming or personal transformation. “It’s so much easier to daven when you[’re] relaxed;” “I found the opportunity to sit, reflect, and think about the tefila, not just saying it, has been very meaningful, because … I can say it my way, and think about what it really means; “I liked the stretching for Barchu, and it was a great way make me more aware.” Interestingly, while the techniques were either explicitly or implicitly Jewish, the language used in response to this question was mostly personal and psychological, and only lightly religious. “When we think about gratitude and let our thoughts pour in. I especially liked trying to find a pattern in my thoughts;” “Sitting quiet of ten minutes because it just lets me think so I can clear my mind for davening;” “Chanting the first line shema; brief moments of channeling your voice into audible prayer can be meaningful to me.”

When asked to articulate the experience of meditation tefillah, students used neutral language to describe religious experience, focusing more on their experiences of psychological and spiritual well-being. “It is very difficult with all of the surrounding distractions, but when I can really connect and channel my soul, I find that it brings a whole new meaning to my day and it makes me much more aware and appreciative;” “very serene and not forced at all like it felt in my regular minyan;” “it’s the slowest part of my day, but in the best way;” “self-aware and humbling.”

Finally, when asked if they had come to any new realizations regarding themselves, God, and Jewish prayer, the responses were diverse. Half noted how they’ve integrated an element of the practice into their standard prayer settings. “When I say Shmone esre now, I try to stand in mountain pose and concentrate on my breath while I say the words;” “In my daily tefilla, I want to just sit silently for a few minutes and clear my thoughts.” Regarding their experience of meditation and new insights into God and their relationship with God, some found a new understanding of God in meditation, others were confused about the place of God, while others distinguished between God and Jewish prayer. “I learned that I can come closer to God and Tefila in new ways. I just have to find the best way for me;” “[it] helped me connect in a new way with God;” “I wouldn’t say it has really affected my relationship to God specifically so much. It makes me think about my inner self more than anything external.”

While a small minority of students felt misplaced or unaffected by the tefillah, most of the student participants offered overwhelmingly positive reflections on their experiences from their experimental prayer sessions. Most students were also able to identify a particular mode of meditation with which they most identified or through which they were most moved and were energized by the possibility for a profound tefillah experience which included rote, daily prayer practice on the other.

While some of those 50 chose not to answer all of the questions, and while a slight minority of students felt misplaced or unaffected by the tefillah, most of the student participants offered overwhelmingly positive reflections on their experiences from their experimental prayer sessions. Most students were able to articulate how their personal tefillah had shifted from a typically neutral or negative experience to one in which they discovered and matured personalized understandings and experiences of prayer. Most students were also able to identify a particular mode of meditation with which they most identified or through which they were most moved. Finally, most of the participating students were moved by the possibility for a profound experiential tefillah that integrated locally Jewish and universal spiritual practices, as opposed to imagining spiritual experience on the one hand, and rote, daily prayer practice on the other.

Their reflections point towards the possibility for a synergistic experience within the daily prayer service, even as some seemed pensive or even doubtful in their surveys regarding such integration without the continued support and instruction of an explicitly alternative prayer group.

One noteworthy observation is the ubiquitous presence of universalist impressions embedded in student responses, and even while addressing a particular religious practice. Indeed, in the detailed and written qualitative data generated by student participants in the meditation tefillah, students expressed a mixed religious/universal language and mixed religious/universal sense around the applied use of meditation in other, more conventional prayer spaces. Most students found the experience of the meditation tefillah uplifting and even transformative, but many of the same students found their time in meditation relevant to a universal sense of self-help or spirituality and had trouble articulating it in terms of religious practice and discourse.

These qualitative findings are well founded on the quantitative sense of prayer across the entire school. If most students in this school seem to prefer alternative prayer experiences that allow for concise, focused, and relevant prayer experiences, then meditation, in its concise, focused, explanatory, and supportive setting, optimizes such a preference.

With all of that said, of course, various idiosyncratic weaknesses unique to this study should not go unstated. The case study presents a certain degree of significant bias, as the instructor of the meditation tefillah acted as ethnographer of the case study, and the students who both elected to participate and chose to respond to the survey were a self-selected group inclined or pre-disposed, in some way, to the practice of meditation. Finally, the school in the study, SAR High School, is an ideologically open, Modern Orthodox day school and might allow for certain programming that would be not be acceptable elsewhere. I only offer this study as an initial gesture into contemplative pedagogy in Jewish day schools.

My findings reflect the trends in developmental research. Adolescents respond positively to tefillah if they can personalize their experiences and elect to engage; adolescents respond positively to tefillah if it can be a means through which they can emotionally access the rote recitation of daily prayer; adolescents respond positively to tefillah if it is shaped as an affective mode in which they cultivate a spiritual disposition. Each of the various meditation techniques did not speak to every member of the groups studied here, but with a fair balance of chanting, breathing, body movement, visualization, and mindfulness, most students found opportunities to integrate at least one of the practices here into their standard service with some satisfaction and even excitement, and most students deepened their tolerance, appreciation for, and practice of tefillah. While the results demonstrated students’ takeaways as both religious and universal, this case study demonstrated the mostly positive effects of implementing a distinctly Jewish course of meditation in a Jewish day school setting.

The author dedicates this article to his students at SAR High School.

References Davis, B. (2013). Editor’s introduction. Hayidion. Spring, 2013.

Jacobson-Maisels, J. (2013). A vision of tefillah education. HaYidion. Spring, 2013.

Kaplan, A. (1982) Meditation and Kabbalah. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser Inc.

Scarlett, W. G. and Perriello, L. (1991). The development of prayer in adolescence. Religious development in childhood and adolescence: New directions for child and adolescent development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Tanenbaum, C. (2013). The problem of prayer in Orthodox yeshivot. HaYidion. Spring, 2013.

Hillel Broder is a graduate of Yeshiva University and holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a teacher of English and Judaics at SAR High School in Riverdale, NY.