But if they are too hard, we wouldn’t try.  That’s why most of us are not running ultra-marathons.  It’s just too much, too far out of reach for most of us.  We cannot even imagine it.  There are approximately infinitely many steps between us and that.  But if our health depended on it, we could probably push ourselves to 5 minutes on the treadmill at ideal heart rate.

So, if it’s too easy, we won’t try.  And if it’s too hard, we won’t try.  It needs to be somewhere in the middle.

But is this true about prayer?  Should prayer be hard enough that we will need to strive for it?  I guess the easiest way to answer the question is, what would happen if prayer was utterly easy.  If you could just roll out of bed (wash your hands, obviously) and bust it out – whatever rolls off the tongue, whatever concerns in whatever language.  No bar – no siddur, no Hebrew, no tefillin.  No minyan.  What would happen then?

Well, the truth is that prayer is that easy.  You can just roll out of bed and do it – whatever language, whatever words.  But someone we have been taught and are teaching that, really, prayer is hard.  You have to learn it – the Hebrew, the order, the laws, what you do if you forgot ya’aleh ve’ya’voh.  And, not surprisingly, we end up with huge swaths of the population praying mindlessly and quickly in a language they don’t understand, expressing concepts they don’t understand and might not believe.  And on the other hand, we have people who seek their prayer elsewhere, expressing other sentiments they might not believe – simply because it is easier.  And in the middle, maybe, there are a few here and there who get it.

Orthodoxy criticizes movements it helped to create.  Whatsupwiththat?  We put the bar so high and then reject people who don’t want to jump?

Really, the prayer bar should be low.  Because the thing that should be hard about prayer is the honesty, the struggle, the feeling, the search, the joy of finding, the satisfaction of expressing.  We shouldn’t be wrestling with language – we should be wrestling with G-d.

But people seem to want to make it work – or at least they think they are supposed to make it work.  For whatever reason, they come, they open the book, they try to follow, they make sure they are on the right page.  But my guess is that many walk away discouraged and forlorn.  Maybe they come back again – maybe they feel like they are earning some kind of karmic credit for suffering through a service.

But this is just too risky, for so many reasons.  They might not ever come back.  They might become entrenched in the suffering servant motif, suffering through more services and practices.  Is this the point of ‘religion’?  I don’t know.  Could go one of two ways: either prayer is about what I would call heart-resonance, whereby we use the words to evoke the feelings, and ‘G-d wants the heart’.  Or, somehow these words work by some sort of magic – they just work because we say them.  The words do the work, not the heart.  I don’t know – it could be true.  Or it might not be true.  But I don’t want to risk it.

I don’t think Orthodoxy has a decent response to this.  Some camps are the word-sayers – ‘say the words.  Your soul knows what’s going on.’  Some just go as quickly as possible – ‘if I gun through it, I won’t have a chance to wonder why I am saying it.’

I’m looking for a deeper acknowledgment of what the Shulchan Aruch itself mentions – ‘whether you say a little or a lot, as long as you heart is directed toward heaven.’  I’m looking for an Orthodoxy that is interested in penetrating to the heart of prayer, to exposing the heart of prayer to everyone.

Kiruv may have made sense a while back in the context of people who at some point knew these prayers but have lapsed.  But I don’t think we have a good system in place for reaching out to people who, all things being equal, would like to pray, but have no interest or capacity to make these words make sense.

So, they end up going to places where the service is easier, shorter, in English.  For many, joining the liberal denominations is not a function of theology but of accessibility.  They might even end up in a place that doesn’t believe in a G-d Who hears prayer, just because the service is easier to follow.

Who and what is being served?  Which god, exactly?  And how did I end up being a part of it?  I love Torah.  I love halacha.  I think it is the truest G-d for a constantly meaningful life featuring dynamic relationships to each other, to the world around us, etc.  And I do believe that halacha, in its purest form, accommodates this situation as well.  I just don’t know how.  Yet.