Dovid’l Weinberg: The Song of Prayer

David Bashevkin: 
Hello and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we’re exploring prayer and humanity.

Special thank you to our episode sponsor, which is in memory of Rabbi Eliezer Skaist, HaRav Eliezer Daniel ben HaRav Eliyahu Dovid, whose yartzheit will be the 15th of Sivan June 4th, generously sponsored by his family. Thank you so much. May his neshama have an aliyah.

This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18forty.org where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails. I can remember the first time that I tried to daven alone in a room. It was in my father’s office. Believe it or not, there was a period where I actually slept in that room. You can ask my parents about that period. I had a mattress in the side that was in the closet and we would take out the mattress. I would sleep there at night.

It was only a few years later that I moved into my sister who then was married, into her bedroom, but it was my father’s office. I used to also sleep there. And I remember on a Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, my mother who was always ever prayerful, insisted that I daven on a Sunday. And I closed the door to the room and I started davening, and there’s this moment of this eerie silence where I think it’s normal in a way where you begin to wonder, is anybody watching this? Is anybody on the other end of this? Where you feel the eeriness. I want to use this word carefully though, it’s probably not the right one, of almost the absurdity of speaking out and calling out to somebody.

Now, I was obviously a kid and I think I acted rather irreverently and foolishly in that room on a Sunday morning. I was probably, I don’t know, 11 years old, 13 years old. I have no idea of whether it was before or after my Bar Mitzvah. But I remember being in a room and being asked to talk to somebody essentially. And the absurdity kind of descended on me of like, is this real? Am I really involved in this? And that’s not because I don’t have an instinctive part of me that is deeply prayerful. I’ve always been instinctively a very prayerful person. I’ve always struggled with the prayer as expressed through Halacha Zmanim feel of the times that we’re supposed to daven. Minion has always been a absolute lifelong struggle for me, a struggle that’s obviously evolved. When you have family, it gets even more difficult.

But I was no all star when I was in Yeshiva even at my very peak of my, what some would call their religious commitment was not something that came all that naturally to me. But I remember in that room that feeling of like, is this real? Am I in fact speaking to somebody? And obviously like any child and the questions I think that children ask about prayer are so real that we spend a lifetime trying to answer them. And in a way, there’s a beautiful passage by Rabbi Soloveitchik in The Lonely Man of Faith where he talks about prayer as almost prophecy in exile. He writes that prayer and prophecy are two synonymous designations of the covenantal god man, colloquially, I think that’s how you pronounce it. Indeed, the prayer community was born the very instant the prophetic community expired. And when it did come into the spiritual world of the Jew of old, it did not supersede the prophetic community but rather perpetuated it.

When the mysterious men of this wondrous assembly witnessed the bright summer day of the prophetic community full of color and sound turning into a bleak autumnal night of dreadful silence unilluminated by the vision of God or made homily by his voice, they refused to acquiesce in this cruel historical reality and would not let the ancient dialogue between God and man come to an end. “If God had stopped calling man,” they urged, “let man call God.” And there’s something so moving about that, of prayer as prophecy in exile, of insisting that we are still connected, insisting that we are still tethered to this divine dialogue that we have. And this notion of speaking plainly to God, whispering to God, that impulse that we have naturally. The quote that I’ve used in my book and I’ve said many times on this podcast that is attributed to Abraham Lincoln where Lincoln says, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

What a moving line. “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” The sense of urgency that compels us, the things that we whisper when we’re walking by ourselves, grappling with our hopes and desires, hoping that our lives unfold in the way that we had once envisioned. This notion of prayer being almost inverted prophecy, the prophecy of exile is something that has always moved me. And in a way it opens up your entire life to be a life of dialogue. Instead of a life of isolation and loneliness, your life is in dialogue with the divine, with the divine idea, with God, with the Ribono Shel Olam in whatever way you want. And even as plainly as you say it, almost like a child reaching out to their father. It doesn’t need to be so mystical, but a child reaching out to a father or mother, a parent, and in that plainness you invest a very different dimension of what life and your own humanity is all about.

And there is a friend who I have known for a very long time, who has written so incredibly eloquently about this, and his name of course is our guest today, Dovid’l Weinberg. I, of course, know him since the days where he was known as Dave Weinberg. I first met Dave Weinberg, I believe in Camp Mesorah. I have some pictures with him that I look back at incredibly, incredibly fondly from our days off and we would go hang out together, and then we connected later on during Bein Hazmanim, that’s the time in between when you have off during Yeshiva. The Bein Hazmanim of my first year in Israel when I met him during when I fondly ominously called my orchard moment, if you remember back to the interview with David Hopin. We kind of hung out in this very monumental hotel room that my dearest friend, Akiva Diamond, his father had rented for him in the King’s Hotel.

I remember sitting in that room and marveling at his creativity. He was always an extraordinarily brilliant songwriter. I remember back then he had an incredible song about his number two pencil and how his number two pencil will always be his number one. It was like a love song, an ode to his number two pencil. I wish I had a recording of it. It was incredibly beautiful. But he has built an incredible, I don’t want to use the word legacy. He’s with us. He’s built an incredible line of thought, a methodology that weaves together and builds bridges between worlds. He builds bridges between the world of music, the world of prayer, and the world of traditional Torah learning in ways that few have realized all three of these strands and building almost this like havdalah candle, weaving together these three different strands to create one illuminating, incredible guide to Jewish life in Yiddishkeit in the modern world.

And he wrote an incredible book on prayer called Birth of the Spoken Word, Personal Prayer As The Goal Of Creation. You could order it online. It’s accessible, but it definitely requires a little bit of background. I think our listeners would gain a tremendous amount from it. What’s so remarkable about the book is that after every chapter, which discusses traditional ideas through the lens of Torah about what prayer is all about, he always closes with an actual prayer that he’s actually composed on his own. He’s a beautiful songwriter, I hope one day to have a full episode, a VH1 Behind the Music on his band, Omek Hadavar. Omek Hadavar was just a brilliant ray of light and infused something in the Jewish music scene that I hope people have not forgotten, weaving together the musical sensibilities almost from the non-Jewish world. Incubus, you hear a little bit of Coldplay, Semisonic in their music, but very soulful.

It doesn’t seem synthetic. It’s very organic, very soulful, very real. A lot of their songs stay with us and I hope one day, and I mean this quite seriously, to do a full episode on the work that he did with Omek HaDavar, later on with his brothers, Matt Weinberg, who’s also known as Rav Moshe Tzvi Weinberg, as well as the other brother, I believe his name is Josh, had an incredible project called The Mishna Project, where they recorded words of the Mishna to music in order to memorize them. The words of the Mishna are deliberately written very, very lyrically.

There is one song that Dovid’l did not write, but he actually just composed as part of a tribute album to Rav Moshe Weinberger. It is actually the composition of Michael Shapiro, a beautiful, beautiful musician. And his music was used for this tribute to Rav Moshe Weinberger. And he has this beautiful song that I think speaks to that feeling of being alone in a room and wondering if there’s anybody on the other end of the line, wondering if there’s anybody even listening. And that’s a poem from Rav Judah ha-Levi, one of the great poets of Jewish history. And the poem goes as follows, it says Ayay emtza echad mkomcha tamir vnelam. Where can you be found? Your place is hidden and concealed. Vayay lo emtza. And where can you not be found? Maleh Kol haretz kavodo. The entire world is infused with your glory. Such a beautiful poem.

Where can I find you? Your place is concealed. Where can I not find you? The entire world is infused with your glory. And Dovid’l plays this to beautiful music with his really haunting voice. And I think that the bridges that he built between music and prayer and Torah are the types of bridges that really address the human experience in their totality and very much a part of our discussion today about what prayer means to him and could mean to us in the modern world. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce our conversation with my dearest friend, Rav Dovid’l Weinberg.

This is very special for me because this is a friendship that really begins, I think before either of us were conscious and deliberate educators or even prayers. Prayer-ers, in a way. We go back a very long way and I’ve always felt deeply connected to you and with you and with your Torah. Our friendship has spanned so many different iterations.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Decades.

David Bashevkin: 
Decades. And whether it’s sharing just friendship together or sharing, my favorite moments is sharing pickles and books together where we talk about the craft of bookmaking and pickle making, which is something that we share as well. You have a beautiful eye. It is my pleasure to speak with you today, Rav Dave/Dovid’l Weinberg. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
My best friends are the ones who still call me Dave.

David Bashevkin: 
I appreciate it. That’s how I first know you. You wrote an incredible book that for a lot of our audience is actually maybe hard to access because the central thesis is couched in so many different ideas. But you wrote a book called Birth of the Spoken Word, and then its subtitle is Personal Prayer as the Goal of Creation, where you make the case that the point of being alive, the point of being a human being is to have moments and experiences of personal prayer with God. I went through the book again today and I was trying to figure out if you were talking to a broad audience who’s not tapped into this form of Hasidic Torah and mystical teachings that you so often draw upon. Where would you begin by transmitting the central thesis of your book?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
There’s a lot there to unpack. First of all, I just want to say hello to your beautiful audience. It’s a long time coming. The work that you’re doing here is absolutely vital and it’s a real gift to be part of it here tonight. I started teaching what eventually became this book in a series of classes, Shirum Lectures in Yeshiva orayta, the Old City where I have the privilege of learning in public, like I like to call it. And I realized after several iterations of giving the share, I think it was maybe after two years that this was really something that I should be writing down. One of the greatest, perhaps most profound gifts that the Jewish people have given to the world is the axiom, the thesis that the world is not made out of particles, but it’s made out of words. That’s a mind-blowing shift of perspective way of looking at the world.

And I decided I probably could have taught sefer bereshis through the lens of chesed or Torah or many other themes you could find there. But I started from the place that was most natural for me, which is through tefillah. And I just found all of these links jumping off the page at me, and slowly it just became something that was obviously larger than the small class of 15, 20, sometimes 25 guys who I was teaching it to. And for years I was writing this book piecemeal a little bit here and there and not a lot of time with a full teaching schedule, and then found myself with a lot of free time. Maybe we can get into that a little later, because of a medical diagnosis and spent time excavating this idea more fully and this is the first attempt at really writing something.

David Bashevkin: 
Well, that’s not completely true.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
My first attempt at writing something for a wide audience.

David Bashevkin: 
Yes.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
So to answer your question directly, I don’t think that I was writing specifically to one type of audience. I think when I wrote the book, I wrote it four or five times because I had the luxury of the time to be able to do that. The first time I wrote it for myself, I wrote it as talking in my own voice. The second time I wrote it, I scaled it back and wrote it as if with an eye towards maybe I was speaking to the average 18, 19 year old young man or woman who were really the people I was teaching at the time. Then I wrote it a third time trying to have in mind, and going through it I didn’t do it from scratch, but I went through it sort of pulling and pushing, having in mind my most skeptical friend to even out the tone.

And then the last time that I wrote it, I think I had some of my teachers in mind to think, is this something I’d be proud to present to people who taught me? And after writing it so many times, I think, I hope that it has a popular audience feel to it because I’m trying to write to a few different people.

David Bashevkin: 
Well, the struggle of writing itself and the struggle of expression itself, which you’re talking about in the context of your book, lies at the heart of what we are trying to do in prayer, which is build a relationship through words. And I want to return to that original question because you said something profound but very quickly, which you said that the Jewish view and I assume you’re referring to a Mishnah and Pirkei Avot, is that our world at the heart, the essence of our world, when you drill down to its essence is not just physical matter, but at the heart of what animates the world is the word. Why is that the starting point that is so important to you and what is the novelty of the fact that the way the Torah, it’s not a Mishnah, I’m sorry, it’s the Torah itself when it describes the act of creation, talks about God speaking rather than doing?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Yeah, so this is an amazing thing. I’m still giving this course. By the way, the book is the first of five parts in my head.

David Bashevkin: 
Yeah.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
You and I know each other for a long time. I always used to write at the end of the things that I was writing, to be continued or not a finished product or that’s like my go-to with everything, with my music, with my writing. So this is the first of five parts that hopefully goes through all of Sefer Bereishis through this lens, like using the aperture of Tefillah. One of the chapters in the book is called Sefer Bereishis as a Textbook on Prayer.

David Bashevkin: 
As a textbook on prayer?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Yeah. That’s really what the book is. The book is trying to see the different sugyas in Sefer Bereishis, all of them through the lens of tefillah at the heart of the story. So when I give this shear one of the opening classes, one of the opening shear that I give, I just begin with a very simple picture that I have on a piece of paper that I hand out to all the guys. I’m teaching this in Yeshiva Orayta where there’s mostly young men. Sometimes I’ll share some of these ideas in other places as well, but that’s mostly where I’m flushing it out further. And again, it’s being written while it’s being taught, which is really the best way to write I think.

So the first thing that I always do is I share with them, it’s not even cherry-picked, it’s really just a screenshot of a Google Image search. You can even do it yourself. Your audience can do it. If you Google search creation of the world, and you’ll tell me what you see. But you’ll see overwhelmingly that there’s this luminous, what Einstein called spooky action at a distance hands, these mysterious hands forming matter in the distance. And that’s what most people think of when they think of creation. It’s a manual mechanical endeavor that HaShem or God or whatever the Almighty is creating the world with his hands. And then you open the Torah as soon as you start thinking about it, there’s this startling portrayal of creation as an oratory endeavor.

David Bashevkin: 
Speaking.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Speaking. You start with that assumption of God is speaking the world into existence. Well, what exactly does that mean? So what I usually try to do in that first approach towards trying to open up Sefer Bereishis as a book on prayer is to argue that independent of whether we could look at the story of creation as being literal or non-literal or how exactly we play with that, it’s clear that the story of creation, if we’re looking at it from a teleological perspective, what is the purpose of creation is that if God is speaking creation into existence, then what does that mean for us?

Does that mean that we’re supposed to be speaking back? Does that mean that there’s an attempt at a relationship here? The example that I always give is if creation is made with one’s hands, if God is creating the world with his hands, then he’s giving us this very complicated, beautiful, complex sound and light show, a ball filled with enough sound and sight and smells and tastes and touches that we could spend our whole life on. But if you see creation as God speaking the cup of tea that I have next to me and the table that I’m sitting at and the microphone that I’m speaking to into existence, especially if you take on a more mystical bent, but you don’t even have to, if you just go back to the beginning and you say that God spoke the world in the beginning, then he is inviting us, I would say, to be in a conversation with him.

And then if you take that and you look at the rest of the story, it seems to be that the hierarchy of creation is moving from the most heaven and earth, earth being, let’s say inanimate, non-speaking to then having some vegetative component and then having animals that have some capacity to speak. But ultimately the crown jewel of creation becomes the human being who can then speak back. So if you set that up as the first chapter of Bereishis, then it begs the question, what exactly does that mean in terms of how we’re supposed to be reading the rest of this book?

David Bashevkin: 
At the heart of your thesis, which it moves me to my core because it’s like this grand what if. What if everything, and you look at the world and you look at the physical world and how much it weighs on you. What if everything is meant to engage in a conversation with the divine? What if everything is meant to step into the thought experiment that there is a foundational voice and you are supposed to speak back? My question is why in the subtitle, if the beginning is creation through speech and prayer, what is the role of personal prayer in all of this? Meaning we are raised in the way that we are taught, in the way that we’re acclimated to davening. We’ve been using the word tefillah, prayer, davening. These are all words that we associate with a fixed sitter.

And I’m just curious, why is there such an emphasis? And I know within your book you draw upon Rebbe Nachman who says this explicitly that, “The point of all of creation is personal prayer.” How can that be it? How could we look at that? Forget the proofs that you could show me parallels. What does that mean? So what is the point of my life? The point of my life is to do what? To be in personal prayer, to compose personal prayers? What is the experience of davening supposed to look like if it’s not this daily mitzvah? And we’ll come back to the fix prayer in a moment, but what is the purpose of life if it in fact is personal prayer?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Okay. So I think we need to maybe take a step back for a second and define prayer on some level. The first thing that I would do, and this is something that I’ve been playing with recently and it’s really changed my davening. There’s a very famous approach towards looking at the shmoneh esrei, which is the basic 18 or 19 now brachos that we say is the apex of the entire prayerful experience that we know right now. And there’s a very famous explanation of Rav Chaim brisker, everybody who’s ever attempted to learn Rav Chaim or been taught Rav Chaim in any way, which again is not my expertise. But anybody, even a guy like myself has learned the Rav Chaim on the difference between the first blessing of shmoneh esrei, the first bracha of shmoneh esrei and the subsequent blessings, which basically to break it down very simply is that there’s this level of kavanah that a person needs.

There’s an intentionality that a person needs when they first begin reciting the words of the shmoneh esrei, where they start off by paying attention to the actual words that they’re saying. And subsequent to that, the rest of the tefillah, person needs to be in a state where they are in the presence of God, they know that they’re in the presence of God. The words themselves become sort of secondary to this idea that I’m standing before God. That’s Rav Chaim’s idea. Now, and this is what I’ve been playing with in the past little bit The Chazon Ish has this idea…

David Bashevkin: 
The Chazon Ish was a contemporary. He lived a little bit after a little bit after…

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Little bit after.

David Bashevkin: 
But he wrote ammendations said notes to this famous work of Rav Chaim Halevi Soloveichik on the Rambam, and he has a note on this idea of the Rambam that bifurcates the level of intentionality where only the first part requires the actual understanding of the words and afterwards just has to be the experience of standing before God, standing before the king, so to speak.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
So the Chazon Ish is a hero to the Jewish people. The Gemara already tells us that there were great sages of the Talmud who would thank their head for bowing when they got to the part when you’re supposed to bow, because they were just, their body was on autopilot. As so many of us, we just fall into the rhythm of shaking back and forth, shuckling or just getting into the words that we tend to sometimes space out. So thanking the body for chiming in at the right times and who hasn’t been there on a Shabbos when you had to pretend like you weren’t banging your chest for Slach Lanu, this is already a Talmudic problem. So the Chazon ish comes along and says that in fact the only requisite intention that you have to have is that if somebody would come and tap you on the shoulder, someone would tap you on the shoulder and they would say, what are you doing right now?

Then you would be able to answer them. And honestly in all earnestness, you’d be able to say to them, I am praying. In other words, ostensibly it takes the level of responsibility from an active awareness of standing before the divine, which is quite a tall order to, if someone would tap you on the shoulder right now, they would say, what are you doing? And so I wonder if we could expand the definition of prayer to not something I do with my feet together three times a day, but a posture towards reality. That somebody could tap you on the shoulder at any point throughout the entire day and they could say, what are you doing right now? And you could say, I’m standing in front of the creator. Now sometimes I’m having a conversation with another person, and that’s a really big part of the thesis of the book, is that the only way to get towards this horizontal relationship between humanity and the divine is to figure out the communicative pathology of human beings not being able to speak to each other.

And it’s not by accident that the first person in the Bible who has an actual conversation with their spouse, a real conversation is Abraham, is Abraham who’s the first person who discovers Hashem. In other words,Adam and Chava he talks about her, he names her, he writes a nice poem about her, but he never talks to her. We don’t find that Noah speaking to his wife. We don’t find that other characters, even Lemech is a in the weeds character over there who he doesn’t talk to his wives. He maybe speaks at them as some of the commentaries point out, and that doesn’t mean that they never spoke to each other. If you would go in a time machine to this historical moment, it doesn’t mean they never spoke to each other. It means that the Torah is making a very clear statement that if you can’t figure out how to speak to the people around you, Noah can’t speak to his generation.

Cain and Abel can’t speak to each other. There’s so much problem with dialogue horizontally with each other then vertically, there’s this problem also with the divine dialogue as well. And so if we start to look at the world as an opportunity to stand with a posture that if I would tap you on the shoulder right now and I would say, what are you doing? Even right now we’re having this conversation. If we’re present of the awareness of God in the room, so then this also becomes a personal prayer. It doesn’t have to be something where I’m standing in the forest clapping, like in the movies or in some neo Hasidic vision of what it means to have personal prayer. Now again, you could accuse me of then blurring the lines and saying that personal prayer then becomes everything. The last thing that I’ll say is that prayer as we think of it in the three times a day that we Shachris, Mincha and Maariv, that we pray in other formal tefillos, even the Rambam sees that as an emergency measure, it’s an emergency exile measure.

The Jewish people are leaving in the second temple period, they’re going into exile, which is a big part of what tefillah may be is it’s crystallizing, putting in the freezer some of these ideals of what a Jewish person hopes for. And this helps us to crystallize an understanding of what it is that we should be hoping, aspiring, praying about and for. But that ideally, as the Rambam writes in the very first halacha in Hilchos Tefila, tefillah is supposed to be something which is spontaneous and something which is some people for longer and some people for shorter, and some people more poetic and some people more simple, but everybody is supposed to be in a sincere and authentic dialogue with the divine.

David Bashevkin: 
I became incredibly moved as you said that as like the prototype for prayer, for the journey for God is also the person who is in dialogue with a spouse within dialogue, with an other, with intimacy in that ultimate paradigmatic horizontal relationship. I can’t even find words, which probably means that it is before prayer. I can’t even find words to talk about how in this generation the union between horizontal and vertical relationships, the vertical relationship we have to God and the horizontal relationship we have to other building with the most close, and then building outwards to those farther and farther away from us is something that is lost on so many. You find people who are only able to connect to horizontal relationships and people who are only able to connect to vertical relationships and the way that you frame it and center avram, I find deeply moving and it resonates with me deeply, even if I’ll be honest, not all of the particular nuggets and the way that you express them, I don’t think I’m always your primary audience for that.

And I say that with great love and care, but the underlying thesis of this book and you in a larger way because the book is an expression of you, you have your own personal prayer compositions in it. The way you wrote this book was very prayerful, but I want to talk about blurring the lines where living a life of prayer, there is a quote that I know you use somewhere in this book, but I forgot where, where if cook begins his introduction to the sitter, I believe and says that a person is always praying, the soul. Your interiority is always praying, and it leads to this blurring of the lines where maybe the prayerful experience you have in shul or that you have in synagogue is less vital and you can new age yourself over prayer where prayer can become meditation, where prayer can become mindfulness.

I’m curious, what is your reaction when prayer is substituted for mindfulness, for intentionality, for purposefulness? In some ways there’s a lot of truth to it and there’s some ways there’s a lot of danger, and I understand why there’s that danger. What do you tell somebody who says, do you mean meditation? Do you mean meditativeness> is that what you’re talking about? Should I just be mindful every day or be more intentional in who I’m speaking to? What do you mean in the most blurred sense of the word, to live a prayerful life horizontally with a spouse, with a loved one, with a child, with a friend, with a coworker?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
So I’ll take an example from the book. One of the major sections, it’s split into five sections. We won’t go into all them right now. One of the major sections is again, you put on these new lenses of looking at Sefer Bereishis through the lens of tefillah. So one of the things that’s just absolutely startling is the first man is created. Just going through the text, we’re just reading the book like a movie script for a second. Man is created, he’s placed in the Garden of Eden, he’s placed in Gan-Eden, and he’s basically told, listen, if you read through the lines, the text jumps out at you that this is before man is created and before there’s any rain and therefore there’s no vegetation in the world. The sages in Maseches Chulin daf samech understand this to mean that if Adam doesn’t daven, if man doesn’t pray, there’s not going to be any vegetation.

You need rain to trigger the blossoming of everything. Now what’s amazing is that, let’s just read the words. Right after that, we’re told that there is a river that emanates from the center of this place called Eden that comes and then waters the entire garden. So you just read those two things back to back and forget about anything other than just putting those two things together. On the one hand we’re told if we don’t daven, there’s no prayer, there’s no relationship, then there’s not going to be rain. It’s like a shotgun wedding. You got to speak to God otherwise there’s not going to be any food followed by, oh, just kidding. There’s actually a river that’s going to come out of nowhere that’s going to make everything blossom and bloom and it’s going to be totally beautiful. What I argued over the course of about three chapters in the book is that the entire setup of Genesis is a choice between let’s say in this particular iteration between rain and the rivers.

Those are two ways of looking at life. Now, the reason I’m going to this is specifically because that’s so vertical. That way of looking at God is saying to you, if you’re not in a relationship of prayerful relationship, there’s not going to be food on the table followed by actually, no, you could actually just go to the river and we’re reminded of the fertile crescent of the Nile River in Mizraim in Egypt, which just everything is blossoming on its own. And the truth is that this is true on a relationship with the divine, but it’s also true in every relationship, whether it’s with a spouse or whether it’s with coworkers or whether with friends. In any relationship, there are two ways to get what you’re looking for. One way is called the way of the rain, which basically means you can’t go and take it with your hands.

Again, going back to that same imagery from the beginning, you can’t take it with your hands. You can ask for it, you can talk about it. You can be open and vulnerable to the fact that you can’t get it on your own. If there’s something that you need from the other person, there’s something that you want to do with the other person as opposed to the river whereas the Torah describes elsewhere, the Nile River, you just kick it with your foot and there it is. You have all the possible water that you could need in order to do what you want to do. In any relationship, and really we bounce back and forth between this all the time. There’s going to be moments in our own relationships where we’re open to the vulnerable dialogue and conversation where I say, I can’t just come and take something.

I want the relationship. It means opening up to conversation and the fact that in the text itself, there’s this pressurized form of you need to ask for rain. Then it’s like, actually there’s another way you can get this and…

David Bashevkin: 
Right after.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
You can get it really easily. But at the end of the day, those rivers that are described in the text lead out of Gan-Eden, they lead out of paradise. They lead you to a place which is ultimately going to remove you from what you really want, which is a relationship. I’m not a man of puns. I work with people who are very into puns, but one of the few places where I indulged myself in the Sefer in the book is that I spoke about the difference between presence with a T-S at the end and presence with a C-E at the end. If God is creating the world with his hands, and if we are taking the world with our hands through the model of the river, there’s a lot of presents to be had. There’s a lot of gifts to be taken, and if God is creating the world with his mouth with conversation and we are taking from the world with a conversation, then there is a lot of presence to be had. There’s a lot of relationship to be built there.

And so you could go for it. You could call that new age and you can call that meditative and you could say that that’s a stance which is not rooted in prayer, but what I would argue is that the word, the spoken word through the prayerful gesture, whether we’re talking about in a synagogue in shul, or we’re talking about having a quick word as you’re throwing the laundry in your laundry machine and you’re saying, God, just like you’re taking the stains out of these clothing, help me to fix, I don’t know my whatever problem I’m going through right now with somebody. That’s a real thing. That’s not just a meditative mindfulness thing. I’m talking about actually opening your mouth and being involved in that conversation, having moments, presence where you are acknowledging the fact that I could just as easily press this button and make this machine go on its own and take it, or I could have this as an opportunity to recognize the divine hand in the creation of the world.

David Bashevkin: 
It absolutely fascinates me and in some ways, for me especially, prayer did not come naturally to me, and when I say prayer, I mean prayer in synagogue. To this day, I have a very difficult time sitting in shul. Those who know me well know that there was never a period in my life where I would get at camp, they give out awards for first to minyan. I was never a nominee for any of those awards. Even at my most committed periods in my life, that was always a struggle for me. I think the mornings are a struggle, but it resonates with me the challenge of accepting the world as conversation. I have a prayerful soul and I think about it a lot and I am able to engage in conversation.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
We were talking before about a Abraham, about Abraham and his relationships with people, his ability, hanefesh asher asu bcharan, his ability to create a revolution of drawing people into this project, which happens to be the project that we’re talking about. But his ability to communicate effectively and to articulate what his vision was and to be able to draw people after him is an amazing power and amazing koach that comes from his ability to speak both as we were saying before horizontally and vertically. One of the amazing things that you’re talking about the struggle with prayer and shul, that although the book is subtitled personal prayer as the goal of creation, I spent a great deal of time talking about how we should not take this emergency measure of the ability to three times a day run through the motions of having this relationship upkeep. Whether it’s because of what I said before, which is more of maybe the way that the Rambam describes it, which is that we’re trying to freeze dry some of these critical ideas in Judaism for the long 2000 year exile ahead or for a different reason.

And that is I think something which maybe could speak to all of us, and I wanted to go into more, maybe you’ll feel comfortable sharing where exactly you felt some disagreement earlier in the previous statement that I said before in terms of the way that you see things. But if we recognize that prayer and Rav Soloveichik spoke a lot about this, this was a big theme in a number of his works, that prayer and prophecy are sort of the two sides of the same coin. So I want you to just think for a second. If you ask yourself, how many times did a Abraham receive prophecy in his lifetime, at least as we’re told in the Torah? Seven, seven times.

David Bashevkin: 
Seven times.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
There are seven episodes where God comes and speaks to Abraham. Now what I would argue, and I think this will resonate with you. For me, it’s so, so obvious. How many times does a person actually pray in their lifetime, an actual pray?

I would say it’s probably also around seven times, something like that. I don’t know what it is. It’s not a real number, but what I would say is that not every time you open a sitter and you start reading the words is that prayer. That is maybe exercise. It’s an exercise of standing in front of Hashem, of the Almighty, of God, of the divine, of the God of your understanding. There’s an exercise that’s going on there, but you could probably think, if you think about the times when you really prayed, you could probably remember them as vividly right now as when you were standing there doing it. I could remember for sure Rebbe Nachman has a concept called firstborn prayers. The first time you ever actually prayed.

David Bashevkin: 
Wow.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
And I could think back, I know exactly where I was standing.

David Bashevkin: 
I know exactly what I was davening for.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
I know what I was davening for, and that’s what Rav Soloveichik is talking about, the prayer prophecy continuum. When I open up a book and I read the words, that is maintaining a relationship on some level, but it’s the moments of those practices that sort of, it’s the same thing again, you want to go back to, we were talking before about relationships. When you’re in a relationship with somebody, whether it’s a spouse, a friend, whatever it is, not every single time that you’re talking to them, is it going to be this mind blowing conversation that opens you up to a brand new way of seeing them, of seeing yourself, but it’s through the steady dialogue and conversation every night over the dinner table or at work or whatever it is, or wherever your friendships or your communication is taking place, that ultimately you have those little breakthrough experiences.

And so the fact that Abraham, Abraham is having seven prophecies where God is speaking back to him, people are always, God’s never speaking back to me. How many times are we actually opening our hearts in a real way where we’re really communicating effectively what we really want to be saying? Forget prayer for a second, when we’re trying to communicate to ourselves how we feel about something, how many sessions of sitting together with a counselor or a dear friend or a therapist, does it take until a person is actually able to say something real that comes from the depth of their bones? And so that’s real prayer, that’s real conversation, that’s real communication. And when that happens, you get a moment of saying, oh, I get what that is. So the difficulty with prayer in a synagogue per se. Yeah. Yes. Like I said, I spent a great deal of time bolstering why that’s a vital and important part of what it means to be in a relationship when it’s even not the most elegant and it’s the most vitalized version of the relationship. But I think it’s an important point.

David Bashevkin: 
I’m very moved by these ideas of prayer and I think they’re so necessary for our generation, but they’re so often I think told in a very fixed, non-relational way. What fascinates me, and I’m not going to ask you what your firstborn prayer is though. I don’t remember reading that concept in your book, and I absolutely love the idea of a firstborn prayer. The first prayer that I really remember saying was a prayer for a relationship, not with God, with somebody else, with a potential spouse, when I was dating. The heartfelt prayers that I would ask to connect to somebody else, to me it draws me back to that original idea that you had, that the first person who prayed is the first person who spoke to their spouse. And I’m not asking you now though, in some way I’m giving you that opening what the topic of your first prayer was, but for me it is fascinating that my first prayer was actually a vertical conversation for a horizontal relationship.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

David Bashevkin: 
Yeah. And that really, really resonates with me. I do want to speak about you and I want to ask you, we were in conversation once when the book came out in a very awkward classroom, no podiums. I wasn’t sure where we should sit. There weren’t enough chairs.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Is that how you took it? I enjoyed it. I thought it was great.

David Bashevkin: 
No, I did enjoy it, but I wouldn’t call the setup a reflection of excellence. It was a prayer from a broken heart, which sometimes can be excellent, though I’m not sure that’s what either of us were initially going for. And I asked you a question and I want to first ask you why you answered it that way then, and I want to re-ask it.

You have already alluded to the fact that you wrote this book during a time where you were in a point of medical crisis. You were diagnosed with cancer. I remember you during that period. I remember asking you even before you were public about it, and that’s what gave you the time to write this book. And I asked you in that room what the relationship between that period in your life was and the writing of the book and your answer at that point when we spoke, there were 30 people in the room. I don’t know how many are listening now or would even remember. Your answer was no relationship. It didn’t really have anything to do with each other. Next question please. And we moved on, and we went to a different question.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Not for discomfort because I mean book predates the course. The book, the writing all predates any sickness or any relationship with having cancer. I had a peculiar case of T-cell lymphoma and it was about a year and a half of recovery. Most of the time I think it was harder on people around me who loved me. It was not a particularly painful or I wouldn’t say the experience of the treatment itself was, and I was never sick from the beginning. I had some lymph nodes. Next thing I know I had a diagnosis. It was never prolonged period of sickness or anything like that. So it was a fairly simple from the moment I was diagnosed, it’s just my optimism kicked in. I said, this is going to be great. And there are plenty of people that both of us know who have gone through similar struggle. With all that knowledge and knowing what was lying ahead, it was like, I got to do what I got to do. Take this road and I’ll come out on the other side, please God.

But the writing just afforded itself because of this, a busy work schedule of teaching from nine to 5:00 every single day and then having responsibilities within my community and obviously responsibilities within my family with my wife and children. There was no way I could possibly could have written that. My answer, there wasn’t really a relationship, is more talking about the technicality of it predating any diagnosis or sickness. What I would say, and I’ve spoken about this before, is that I think some of these ideas that we’ve been speaking about and having this type of ongoing conversation relationship crafted a safety net that was there all along that I didn’t ever anticipate or hope to have to use, but much to Rabbi Soloveichik’s chagrin, I would probably characterize myself as a homo religiosus.

For your audience who’s lost, Rav Soloveitchik wrote a famous book called Halakhic Man. And he describes there the character, which is the precursor to the Halakhic man, which is someone who just sees the world through a religious lens. I’m also a Halakhic man, or I try to be. I was once very moved that Soloveitchik’s brother categorized himself as a homo religiosus, a person who just naturally sees the world through a religious lens. And I think from the time that I’m a little kid, it’s probably partially nurture, partially nature, I have always been a prayerful person. It sort of fell into my lap. You were talking before about finding yourself in a shul or in a prayerful dialogue and trying to find your place in that, conversation with the divine is always very natural. My relationship with a concept of Hashem predates my understanding of did I keep mitzvoths? That’s just the family that I grew up in. Before I was aware of keeping shabbos and kashrus and formal observance of mitzvoths, I always had a very intuitive relationship with divinity, whatever that means.

I don’t know what that means exactly. So it was very natural for me to be drawn towards seeing, like I said before, I could have written Sefer Bereishis as a textbook on chessed, on doing acts of kindness to other people, but it was almost natural because of, I don’t know, is it because of my name Dovid that I feel prayerful? Is it because I am musical, and so there’s a certain cross between that emotionality that is necessary in the prayerful experience? I’m not sure exactly where the nature and the nurture cross in order to create that, but it predated any sickness. But it came in very handy to have that way of looking at the world.

David Bashevkin: 
I want to not push back, but clarify. When we spoke then, and even when you’ve been covered and your book has gotten some media attention, I have noticed that there is a hesitance of, I trying to state this with integrity and decency.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Go for it.

David Bashevkin: 
But you’ve always had a hesitance of centering person dealing with cancer writes book on prayer. That’s never, I always sensed a deep discomfort with you centering your cancer diagnosis or interlink with the book even when, to be honest, I feel like you’d sell more copies if you were more, you push that button a lot. Is there something you’re trying to avoid? Either when I ask that question or in general, when the media, and you’ve gotten lovely attention for the book a few years ago when it came out, there was always a hesitance of couching it as this personal story of grappling with cancer. Is it just because it’s not fully true or there’s another hesitation or discomfort in framing your relationship with prayer being intertwined with a personal story of a medical illness?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
It’s a great question. I’ll try to be decent also in my answer. I could have leaned into that I suppose, it just didn’t feel authentic. I could have gotten a title that said, man with cancer rights book on prayer. That sounds really nice. But I also could have written man with loving family and parents and thousands of people who are supporting him and a blessed life for 33 years before I was diagnosed, and another five years or four years since I’ve been past that. That’s just, it’s not as great a title. Man who has wonderfully blessed life writes book on prayer. And I think both because that’s the true answer. And also is the pushback. You ask, is it either or? I think it’s sort of both. There’s a truth element to man with cancer rights book on prayer. It’s very salacious. It has everything you need in it to sell a lot of books. It just doesn’t fit my description of my life. My life has been one of so much blessing and it didn’t seem like that would be the right way.

The second reason, which I think dovetails with that is that I don’t think that I relate to it this way and I certainly don’t want other people to relate to prayer as something which you turn to in a time of crisis. It’s not only a lever you pull when you’re in a time of crisis. We spoke a few times with Rav Soloveitchik, there’s an exercise you said you wanted to eventually, maybe we’ll move into that direction about teaching prayer to students or to…

David Bashevkin: 
Yeah.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
I work mostly my nine to five is mostly 18, 19, 20 year olds. But at this point a lot of them are older and I live in a beautiful community in Yerushalayim where there’re adults and there’s adult education opportunities and there’s opportunities to teach as well.

One of the exercises that I usually do with the young men who I’m fortunate enough to study with throughout the year is Rav Soloveitchik in one place, I believe he does it for sure in there’s a book that he wrote, well, he didn’t write, it’s based on lectures that he gave called Worship of the Heart. But there’s another place where he does it even more clearly. It’s escaping my mind right now where Rav Soloveitchik outlines five different ways that a person can jumpstart into a conversation with Hashem, with the divine. And again, I’ll ask you, I asked before that people should try to think of their firstborn prayers if they’ve been fortunate to have one. This is also a really good exercise to think where do I fall out on this sliding scale of different ways, different modalities to speak to the divine.

So Rav Soloveitchik says that there’s some people who their reaction to wanting to say something, meaning not just having a powerful experience, but wanting to actually translate that into words, into something escapes my mouth and I actually begin to speak about it. So Rav Soloveitchik, he says five different approaches and I’ll explain each of them. The first one is mathematical. Then there’s an aesthetic experience that a person could have that translates into, I want to talk about this. There’s an ethical, a mystical and a simple. Okay, so let’s go through all five of them really quickly.

David Bashevkin: 
Tell me.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
He says, the mathematical is a person is just blown away by, they see a suspension bridge and they’re a super sciencey person. And they could see in that experience of what is happening there that is allowing this bridge to stand.

I’ll give it as an example. Or the person is studying some aspect of gravitational fields and then all of a sudden they’re moved by the precision or they hear some fact about if the sun was this much closer to the earth, we’d all be burnt up. If it was this further away, we’d be… And through that precision, that mathematical, almost scientific formulation of the perfection of the cosmos, some designer, you’re moved to some expression, but that’s a very brainy type of intellectual experience. Another person will just simply see a sunset and they’re like, that is gorgeous, it’s beautiful. Or I see the Grand Canyon, or I see a waterfall, or I see a child that’s so beautiful and all of a sudden I’m moved to speak. That’s the aesthetic experience. Then there’s the ethical experience. Somebody maybe sees somebody do something kind for another person or you yourself find the means of giving some amount of charity that you never thought you would be able to give.

And you say, where in the world did that come from? I’m supposed to just be a ball of chemicals. How did that happen? And you’re moved to see this as a transcendent experience and you want to talk about that. And then there’s a fourth person who maybe is of more of a mystical, they’re thirsty, they’re yearning for transcendence, and they want to reconnect with the one. And the fifth one, which is the simple, what Rev Soloveitchik calls the simple one is the last one that we’ve been pushing on, which is I’m just desperate, which is not a small thing that’s a very deep trigger for prayer. But if a person just sees the simple prayer as the only opportunity to speak with God or to have a moment of reflecting verbally on what exactly and trying to articulate their existence in a way that’s supposed to make sense of some pain, of some trauma, then they’re cheating themselves of at least four other avenues of having an experience that is prayerful.

And so when you ask the question, is it sickness that triggered me to write a book about prayer? It’s like, yes, but also having my first child and my second child and my third child, and also studying a profound passage in the Talmud with its relevant Rishonim and codes and seeing the precision of the Torah is also a profound experience that leads me to prayer. There’s so many different angles. And so when you ask the question like, man with cancer write book on prayer, I think it just shortchanges what prayer could be and it doesn’t authentically reflect what led me to write the book and why I’m so passionate about conversation and prayer and use of words to explain our reality and to articulate our existence.

David Bashevkin: 
One of the most common questions that people ask is, I prayed for something and I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. I have no doubt we both know people who have fought with illnesses, we know people who have succumbed to illness and we know people who have been cured of illness. And the most common answer that we usually hear is sometime God says no, which basically frames the prayer experience as prayer is the act of asking for something. If you read the translations of our daily shmoneh esrei, we are asking God for things, we’re asking God for health. And the answer of sometimes God says no, some people find deeply satisfying. I find it deeply unsatisfying because it’s not sometimes God says no, dare I say statistically, if you would take 100 people who pray daily and 100 people who do not pray, I’m not sure if statistically there is one group who more frequently gets what they want in this world, if there’s one group who more frequently attain the successes that they yearn for.

And I’m curious cause I think your book, and I think already in our conversation there is a solution here, but I want to ask you, we could talk about you, we don’t have to talk about you, it’s the same question. But you’re sitting, you have cancer and you are praying, and part of you’re praying as you’re asking God to heal you. The thesis of your book, the reframing of prayer as conversation, how does that change the question of did God not answer me? How does that reframe what the purpose of prayer is? Or some people say God is not a gumball machine.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
I think our dear teacher, Rabbi Judah mischel likes to say God is not an ATM machine in the sky.

David Bashevkin: 
Correct. So what is it then? Meaning it’s not an ATM machine, it’s not a gumball machine, and we’ve certainly I think ruled out the notion that the answer is sometime God says no as if prayer, usually he says yes and it does increase your chances. I don’t think that’s true and I’m being honest with myself. I don’t think when I am praying for somebody, even when I’m saying to Hillam for somebody, I’m always grappling, you’re saying Psalms for somebody, am I trying to increase the odds that they get cured? It’s not my firstborn prayer, but we one time had to take my infant daughter, she’s now much older. We one time had to take her to the hospital and that’s probably the last time I think to memory that I have prayed in the realest sense of the world, in the existential sense of the word.

And when you’re sitting in a hospital lobby and you see an infant who’s attached and thank God she was fine and is fine, but that imagery, it’s so instinctive, it’s so real. What am I doing in that moment? And I’m not asking to prove God to me or as an atheist, I’m asking am I trying to increase the odds that my child is healed? Am I trying to increase the odds that I’m cured of cancer or am I doing something else and if so, if it’s not an ATM in the sky, so what is it that I am doing?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
This is the hardest of all questions. I can only tell you there’s a teaching from the Shem Mishmuel. The Shem Mishmuel says that the reason that we pray in a whisper, especially the formal prayer of the Shmoneh Esrei, is that there’s something so personal about every person’s relationship with prayer that it’s hard to articulate exactly. What I can say is that my relationship with prayer sometimes often aims, I would say to be simple in the way that yes, I pray as if and with a belief that my prayer can change the outcome. As naive or as childish as that might sound, I think that if I’m in an authentic relationship, then I believe that I have the ability to be in communication with the divine by dint of the fact that I contain a piece of the divine myself A chelek elokah Mimah. And theology aside exactly how that happens, Rav Yosef Albo changing myself or whatever the theology itself falls flat.

It’s just a technical answer of how can we change God’s mind if he is all knowing and he knows exactly what he’s doing. Leave that aside for a moment. I think that the prayerful experience for me has and continues to be and will continue to be one where I believe that prayer matters. To put it bluntly, that when I pray it matters and that although there is some resonance with that idea, and again for some people it works for some people, it’s deeply upsetting this idea that God sometimes says no, you were talking before about being in a ICU or a hospital with your daughter. I recall an episode where I was also, my daughter needed stitches, she fell and she needed stitches. I also have stitches right here on my forehead. She needed stitches and I remember they put a little bit of a sheet over the operating theater right over the place where they’re doing the surgery and I could see her eyes peeking out from underneath the sheet this most heartbreaking as they’re giving her these a few stitches to stop the bleeding and to be able to…

So I just remember her looking at, I mean she must have been a year and a half, not even and how much is in my head and how much just the experience of a parent and a child having that interaction, where seeing her eye peer through that the little window that was there in the sheet that they were using to block out her face so they could focus on the area where they’re trying to heal her and having her lock with my eye and be like, what are you doing to me was this very powerful experience of like, I can’t explain this to you right now.

You’re one and a half years old. You don’t have the ability to understand why it is that I’m literally holding you down so that the doctor can put in these stitches, and that’s an impossible thing to ask anybody else to do. I would never ask anybody else to accept that as an answer that God sometimes says no. You have to grapple with that in your own way. Each person has to have their personal relationship with the divine. What I can say though is that prayer itself has been for me and was as someone who was sick, there were definitely moments when I found myself truly praying. Of those seven true prayers that a person has or whatever number it is, some of those were when I was deeply sick and alone in let’s say in the house exiled from the land of Israel where I’m living and let’s say everyone was out and I was by myself, and I found myself having real honest and raw conversations with God and they were real and they were painful and did I think that they would affect the outcome?

Absolutely. I thought that they would affect the outcome, but I also understood, and I think that this is what you were alluding to, a big line of reasoning or an underpinning of the book is that there’s something about the child reaching out to the parent in that moment, when my daughter was looking at me and saying, help me what is happening, that is worthwhile even though there’s not the possibility in this moment that I would help her. The reason why that falls flat for people, again, the nuances of it, each person has to have these conversations one-on-one. This is not a podcast friendly one size fits all answer is that, well, we think of God as being able to do anything and do everything, so why wouldn’t he just make everything perfect? And this is a very long and deeply theological conversation to be had, but the answer on a personal level is that yes, I believe that my prayers do make a difference. Exactly how they make a difference, whether they’re a difference of psychology and the way that I relate to when the answer is no or whether it’s sometimes tilting the fate in my favor to be able to have a yes for something that I’m looking for.

Again, there’s theological ways to deal with that, but my experience is that I’m hoping for a yes. I don’t think that this is just a meditative experience where I’m reaching out for something which is completely beyond me, and I think that’s part of the prayerful experience. I’ll just add one more thing. One of my favorite teachings, I review it probably once a month, it’s found in Rav Schwab’s sefer on prayer, Rabbi Shimon Schwab gave a series of lectures on the sitter. Very different than the type of work that I was doing in my book, really going through the word by word going through the there’s great value. And one of the reasons I wrote the book that I did is that there’s so many people who have wrote in beautiful commentaries on the actual words and the meaning and I was trying to write what does it feel like to be in a prayerful relationship?

What’s the psychology of prayer? So Rav Schwab, in his commentary to Adon Olam writes that his teacher one time ran into the son of the Chasam Sofer. His teacher was Rabbi Broyer and Rabbi Broyer of course is connected to the school of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, one of the most articulate modern thinkers of the previous generation. And the Chasam Sofer’s son asked this student, this student of Rav Hirsch, what was Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, Give me it on one foot. What was his whole thing? Tell me His entire worldview on one leg. And Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch apparently used to constantly return to this idea. The first prayer that we say in the morning when we open up the siddur is Adon Olam. And Adon Olam is this prayer of God is completely transcendent Adon olam asher malach beterem Kol yitzir Nivra. God is God before there’s a world and he’s going to outlive the world and he is completely transcendent.
And the entire first part of that prayer is all about how essentially there’s this completely unrelatable God that we should have nothing to do with. And then, and this is Rav Hirsch to focus in on, the prayer turns at a certain point and every single word after that or every phrase ends with the letter yud, which means personal Hu Keili He is my God chay goali, tzur chevli beit tzara. He is my God, he is my salvation, he is my… And the place of prayer is that peculiar meeting place between this ultimately transcendent distant impossible to reach God and the fact that I truly do attempt to reach beyond this infinite chasm between the divine and myself because of the fact that I carry a piece of the divine within myself and Hu Keli, Chay Goali. He is my personal God and my personal salvation and that’s why I said before it’s something which has to be done in a whisper, has to be something which a person works out for themself because the place of drawing the nexus between the infinite and the finite person that you are is something which is a steer that every person has to resolve for themselves.

David Bashevkin: 
I am very moved by that. We probably have different relationships to tefillah, but it’s a hair’s breath difference in that for me, I wouldn’t call it meditative and I wouldn’t say that I don’t try to affect the outcome, but I think because of my own life and maybe my own disposition, I can’t pray exclusively if I think this is going to change the outcome.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
I would agree, yeah.

David Bashevkin: 
To me, I’m like bringing my most personal problems and my most personal difficulties. As a child to a parent, I love the imagery of locking eyes during a surgery. I was also put in a papoose when I got hit right above my lip by my dearest friend, Yoni Statman when we were playing with blocks together and sent me to the hospital. But the notion of taking your most inner world and bringing it to the divine and talking it for the divine, even if maybe the outcome won’t change, but as an act of conversation, as an act of grappling, as an act of navigating your most personal, and an act of acknowledgement that you stand before somebody, your life stands before something greater than yourself. Bringing that Adon Olam Torah, it’s breathtaking. The notion of bringing the most personal to the transcendent and prayer being the outgrowth of that nexus, that to me really encapsulates what prayer is to me.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Here’s the other piece of that. In Chabad Siddurim and the siddurim of Lubavitch Chabad, it’s found in other siddurim as well. Right before we begin the formal prayers of psukei dzimra right before we’re about to start really davening, all the free tefillah stuff is there’s the 13 principles of Torah study, the yud gimmel middos shatorah nidreshes bahen. The 13 exegetical principles of Rabbi Yishmael. Now the last one is amazing. You don’t have to know exactly what these exegetical principles are all about to understand what I’m about to say.

David Bashevkin: 
But they’re normally used. These principles which introduce all of prayer are normally used in Talmudic study for how we analyzed and grapple create…

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
That’s right.

David Bashevkin: 
Laws from the Talmud.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
That’s right. So the last one, the 13th one, normally in most siddurim it’s written vchein and similarly after we’ve given you the first 12, there’s also vchein and similarly there’s Shnei ksuvim hamachishim zeh et zeh two verses that seem to contradict each other. In the Torah you find two verses that contradict each other and you don’t know exactly how to resolve them until you come to the third verse, until you get to the Kasuv hashlishi, that third biblical verse that then resolves whatever the issue is. That’s the simple, sometimes when you’re studying the tore studying the bible, you have two different verses that seem to contradict each other. A third one comes and resolves and pulls the two of them together and shows you the nuance between the two of them. In the chabbad siddur, and this is if I’m not mistaken, I believe this is found in the standard text of that Arizal siddur.

There’s something peculiar and I’ve waiting to hear other, maybe your listeners will write into your emails, other explanations of this, but in the Chabad siddur it doesn’t say vchein shnei ksuvim. And similarly another way of analyzing the Torah in addition to all the other ones that we’ve said before is if you have two verses that contradict each other, a third one can come and resolve it. It says vkan which means and here. And here there are two verses that contradict each other and a third that resolves it, and this is the introduction to all of prayer and in the tradition of Chabad, the understanding of that two verses that contradict each other that are resolved by a third, which is very much in line with this idea of adon olam is that the whole problem of prayer, and this is what gets into this idea of I’m asking for something, do I think I can actually affect the outcome?

The entire linchpin of the problem of prayer, what it is that we’re trying to solve here is that there is an infinite God. There is from a mystical perspective, which Chabad is certainly, chassidus is certainly mystically inclined. There is this notion that when we say that ein od milvado, there is nothing other than God, what that means is there is nothing in the world other than God. Not that there aren’t other gods, but that everything in the world, like I was saying before, the entire world is spoken to being by God and nothing else exists except for him is completely at odds with the fact that I am here and I’m suffering in this moment or I am exalting in this moment or I am having this experience right now. Whether it’s aesthetic or whether it’s mathematical or whether it’s ethical or whether it’s mystical or whether it’s simple.

Whatever the experience I’m having, there’s something at odds with the fact that I’m standing here. There’s one verse in the Torah that says ein od milvado. There’s another verse in the Torah that says, naaseh adam bzalmeinu, let us make man. Like I exist. I’m here. You don’t need a verse in the Torah, it’s a Sfara lama yikra, I exist. So you have these two verses that seem to contradict each other and the only way to resolve that can hear as we’re about to pray is that there’s two verses, anochi hashem elokecha that’s ein od milvadi on the one hand and on the other hand there’s naaseh adam, there’s my experience that I’m having and the resolution to that is uliavdo bchol livavchem, which is the experience of prayer, is to stand in prayer and to blur the lines between having a transcendent God who is completely should have nothing to do with my life and yet I’m able to stand here and say, who keili vchay goali. There’s something that’s happening here. And that’s how you resolve the contradiction between there is only God and I have my experience, and I’m trying to resolve those two experiences and to make things move in the way that I want them to and I think that they should.

David Bashevkin: 
That I find deeply moving and bringing your experiences before God is something that resonates so deeply with me because it’s a reminder. I think it’s what makes us most human. I think we’re living in a generation where the very definition of humanity is being challenged, reshaped, reimagined. And I think our answer for what makes us most human, and I think the answer that lies at the heart of your work and your book is we are prayerful. It is at the heart of everything that we do. I do want to touch upon the educational component of prayer. You and to a degree myself are both in this category that you mentioned of being a homo religiosus. I think prayer, emotionality, I mean thank God we both have our intellectual gifts. I’m sure we both excelled in different areas academically. I know you certainly did, but we’re both deeply religious people. And when I call myself deeply religious, I think our listeners know I don’t mean that in the typical sense, but I am. I consider myself a homo religiosus. Prayerfulness does come naturally to me.

I don’t find any other vision of the world compelling, but you do teach at Orayta and many of your students I could imagine are not cut from the cloth of homo religiosus. They are not intuitively emotional spiritual in the way that maybe comes naturally to others. And I’m curious how you educate, how you introduce the notion of prayer to a generation of students that this doesn’t come naturally to. Do you steer them to other teachers? Part of the beauty of Yeshiva Orayta, which I admire so much, is they have a really nice breadth of educational personalities and you have a personality that I imagine resonates deeply with some. And for others they don’t necessarily have the vessel that aligns with your personality and your teaching, but sometimes I’m sure you stretch out a little more broadly and you’re able to connect with these students. How do you educate a student who these ideas, the notion of Godfulness, prayerfulness does not come naturally to? Are you reorienting your words, reorienting your ideas? Do you still find a way in? Are you committed that everyone in the recesses of their soul has a little bit of the homo religiosus buried inside? How do you relate to students where these ideas and experiences do not come naturally to?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
I’ve worked in a number of very fine institutions. I don’t think that Orayta is so different than them in that there’s going to always be a handful of students who fit that character that you’re describing as naturally feeling a pull or a connection towards something transcendent and there’s always going to be students who are by nature more skeptical and more exacting in their search and their discovery. I don’t necessarily think of myself as homo religiosus to the exception of being a person who tries to deeply ground my faith in reasoning. One of the first teachings of Rebbe Nachman in Sichos Haran starts off by saying ki ani yadati, because I know that God exists and that’s passuk in tehillem from King David, from David hamelech. He says, “I know that God exists .” David Hamelech is saying there’s something I can’t explain to anybody else. But then after that, if you go on in that very next verse in tehillim, David hamelech is starting to describe his faith and there’s something which is very descriptive and I think it’s important as educators that even if we have a natural relationship with the divine, the way the Baal Shem Tov said it is elokeinu velokei avoseinu. There’s sort of this, elokei avoseinu means the God of my father’s.

It means like a natural inborn, call it like a spiritual DNA, archetypical passed on relationship with the divine, but there also has to be elokeinu, which means something that I can articulate to somebody else and both of those are really important. Elokeinu means that it’s something that I can pass on to somebody else. If I just have that relationship which is my own personal, it’s going to be very difficult to pass that on. Practically, how do I do that in school if that’s what you’re asking? In Yeshiva setting, if there’s a student who finds it difficult to naturally be pulled towards an idea like this, I asked you to do it before, not because I felt that you were struggling with it, but I genuinely think that this is a proper way to study Torah. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with this.

I think that there are times when if we study, and that’s one of the things I do in this particular series of shirim, if we study the Torah as a book, which is a funny thing to say. Sometimes I’ll say just picture this as a movie script for a second. Take away just for a moment, for a moment, I think this is a found as a me famous medrish in Eicha where God says, “Study my Torah and forget about me because ultimately the light in the Torah will lead you back.” I think using that as a paradigm, I don’t for a second ask them to depart from the divine nature of the Torah and there’s much to talk about of that, but I say just for a moment, let’s just look at this as a piece of literature for a moment and see that this is a profound expression of what would it mean to have a book, a Sefer that is asking you to see the world as communication and how does that affect your entire way of looking at everything?

There’s a social psychologist, a famous psychologist who was a Jew himself called Erich Fromm who wrote a book called To Have or to Be, and the book does quote a lot from the Bible, does quote a lot from the Torah. But the whole idea of to have or to be is really able to be couched in a way that doesn’t demand of you anything to have meaning to be in a relationship like we were talking about before, where I take with my hands, the rivers and things are created with the hands. And to be is more to be in a relationship and that’s really what the book is about. It’s a fantastic book and if somebody would ask me for a recommendation of how to work on prayer, I would say that’s one of the books that you should read. There are others as well, other classical sefarim, but that’s a really important book for shifting our perspective from having, like you were talking before about do I get what I want in my prayer? That whole question starts from a perspective where I look at the world as something that, do I have it or I don’t have it.

David Bashevkin: 
Prayer becomes another river.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
It becomes just another river to grab as opposed to the whole point of prayer is to become something, is to be part of something, to be part of a conversation, and that’s something that everybody can really relate to.

David Bashevkin: 
It’s so special for me in particular to dialogue horizontally with you about such vertically significant issues and the work that you are doing and bringing into the world. I hope we get to see another four parts of your Torah.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
I’m working on the second one. First book is only covering the first two chapters of Bereishis. The next one’s going to cover three through 11. It’s called Dissent of the Spoken Word. It’s about all the messy mess ups of Adam and Chava not speaking to each other and eating from the eitz hadaas and Kayin and Hevel and Noah and the Tower of Babel, which is obviously a lot about language.

David Bashevkin: 
Sure.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
That’s the next one. Yeah.

David Bashevkin: 
And the imagery, I mean so much of the Baal Shem Tov Torah is couched as the whole story of the flood as a metaphor for prayer. I cannot wait to read it. I am curious for you, on a personal basic level, is there a particular prayer that resonates with you that you return to? A fixed prayer, that you return to spontaneously that’s always on the edge of your lips? I know I have one. It’s one that I come to. It’s the name of my first Hebrew work, which is a verse I believe from Habakkuk. It’s a prayer for mercy, even within anger, a plea for mercy, which I think both has vertical and horizontal significance. I’m curious for you, is there a particular prayer that you return to spontaneously?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
As I mentioned before, I am somewhat musical and what often tends to happen is that this shifts from time to time. In other words, I’ll become fixated on, and it’s not always from a sitter, sometimes it could be from sefer. I could be learning Torah and I come across a paragraph or an idea. I’ve written songs to the words from a Rav kook’s writing. I’ve written songs to things from the Piacezner Rebbe. I’ve written songs from the Gamara, from the Talmud, and sometimes I’ll just latch onto something that jumps out as more than just an idea and it somehow makes that long journey from the head to the heart, which is the longest of journeys. And after latching onto it, I’ll sometimes be sitting on it for months, even years before finally the right melody comes down. But for me, that’s a fixed prayer that becomes spontaneous.

It’s something that I can relate to and those live with me in many different ways. What’s an example off the top of my head? I mentioned before this idea from Rav kook that the neshama is always davening. There’s a aspect of prayer which is perpetual, and that’s a passage from Rav kook’s sefer, olat raya is his commentary on the siddur. And I took those words and I turned it into a song. And I haven’t recorded it properly like many things that still are on the docket to do. But that itself becomes a prayer and a meditation, an oral meditation that I am praying to live with that awareness that I am in a constant state of prayer, whether I’m actively using my mouth to pray or it’s a posture like I was saying before, where someone could tap me on the shoulder and say, what are you doing right now? And I could say I’m standing in front of the divine presence, but that’s certainly one fixed prayer of sorts that I come back to all the time. But there are a number.

David Bashevkin: 
Would you mind sharing the Hebrew of what that line is?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Yeah, sure. The line is Ein hatfila ba btikunah. The prayer does not come to its fixed full expression, it doesn’t come to fruition. Ela mitoch machshava. Unless a person comes to the place of mind of thinking. shhaneshama tamid mitpallelet. Until the person knows that the soul is constantly in a state of prayer.

David Bashevkin: 
That is absolutely beautiful, and you should know the song that you didn’t write but you recorded from Michael Shapiro in honor of Rav Moshe Weinberger is something that I returned to constantly. It’s based on a poem of Rev Yehuda Halevi that was maybe popularized by Rav Hutner, which is everything that we’ve been talking about it, which begins Ayei emtza echad. Where can you be found, God. Mkomcha tamir vnelam. your place is hidden and concealed. Vayay lo emtza. And where can you not be found? Maleh Kol haretz kavodo. The entire world is infused with your glory.

And it’s in within that nexus bridging those two feelings, those two experiences, that prayer and the world of prayer, the entryway to the world of prayer that you have so dutifully constructed for people to walk through that really bridges those two worlds and those two experiences. I always end my conversations with more rapid fire questions. My first question, we spend a lot of time talking about your book. I’m wondering if there are other books in Hebrew or in English particularly about prayer or the experience of prayer that you recommend or you would recommend for somebody who is looking to connect to this experience more?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
So I already tongue in cheek referenced To Have or To Be from Erich Fromm.

David Bashevkin: 
Yes, and I appreciate that.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Yeah, I would say that one of the basic compendiums in English for sure, to opening the world of prayer, just seeing the breath from the Bible really through the Gemara and through the rishonim and through chassidus is Rav Ari Kaplan’s, The Call to the Infinite. That’s for sure a book which is, it’s not going to give you that same psychological emotional impact maybe that other books are going to give you, but it’s a starting point that it’s really hard to begin without. I have found they’re hard. They’re hard, but I would definitely recommend, there’s a series of books called chassidus mvueres, which is really coming out from Chabad, and they have one volume on tefillah, which is longer essays from the first Lubavitcher rebbe, the Altar of Lubavitch, Rav Schneir Zalmon of Liadi, and one of the volumes is on prayers on Tefillah.

And those essays in particular actually, I gave a number of classes on those. You don’t finish it in one session. It takes sometimes weeks to get through a single piece, but that’s a good way to begin to shift your perspective on how the depth of the prayerful experience could be more than just perush hamilim, more than just explaining what the words mean. I mentioned Rav Shwalb’s seferan prayer, which I think does a good job of balancing explaining what the prayers are about and like the example I gave before of adon olam, there are a lot of nuggets in there that are just really paradigm shifting and there’s a lot, there’s many books. I think that’s enough for now.

David Bashevkin: 
My next question, which I’m going to make a condition that you can’t answer the other four volumes that you’ve already spoken about, but if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical or as long as you needed to go back to school and get a PhD, what do you think the subject and title of your dissertation would be? Or book?

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Yeah.

David Bashevkin: 
It can’t be prayer. We’re assuming that’s already in the works.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
We’ve known each other for a long time. I am a deeply hungry, curious seeker of knowledge and information. I am not cut out for school. So PhD is out of the, and I love to write also. It’s not like if they had the opposite of all but dissertation. If they had just dissertation, then maybe I [foreign language 01:13:36]. Just dissertation, I’ll get a JD. What I would like to do, and this is something that’s also a bit in the works, I just, there’s no way I have the time to do it right now. It’s a passion project. Rebbe Nachman revealed a Spark Notes synopsis to the Tehillim, which he called the tikkun haklali. He basically said there’s 150 chapters in all of Psalms and they could be boiled down to 10. Many people recite them as almost like a panacea. You just say it, it’s almost like a sugula.

You recite the words and it’s some sort of meditative experience. I would love and I started doing it a little bit during Corona, and then life came back to full blast and don’t have time to do it. I would love to go through those 10 psalms, those 10 chapters of Tehillim and show how every single one of those verses is a map, a guide book to the chuva process. I had the great fortune of writing this book on prayer. I had the good fortune of recently putting out a book about Torah, which is a translation and commentary on Rav kook’s Oros Torah. And I would love to put out whether it’s a PhD on Rebbe Nachman’s tikkun hklaki, not so much about the history of it and a little bit about that. That’ll probably be somewhat in the introduction if it ever comes to fruition. But to really go through and to show how each one of these verses is not just a meditative mantra to say, but is actually a piece of advice how a person can get up in the aftermath of falling down.

David Bashevkin: 
And just remind, I love that idea and it’s such a mystery because it is popularly known tikkun klali, but Rebbe Nachman as far as I know, doesn’t make it abundantly clear what its purpose, meaning, significance is.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Yeah, the origin, the idea really is a Gemara in Psachim. The Gamara says in Psachim that there are 10 different types of tehillim. We’re all familiar. There’s mizmor and there’s limnetazach and there’s hallelukah, and there’s all these different types. So Rebbe Nachman says that there’s an archetypical version of each of those, and those 10 mizmor of Tehillim represents the synopsis of the entire energy of Tehillim, which is a book of David hamelech heart-wrenching attempt at many different parts of the human experience.

But certainly a large part of it is the process of attempting to rectify certain experiences in his life and the fall from grace after sins. So Rebbe Nachman wrote down a handcrafted, I don’t know what to call it’s a pharmaceutical note of here are the 10 talem that you can say. And there are many people who relate to it like that. I just tend to want to mine things for, it’s not just something you say in order to try to absolve yourself of some wrongdoing, but it’s a map. It’s a roadmap to being able to. And I’ve done the first two of 10, I gave the classes and I started writing them up and I’d be happy to share them with you, but I’d love to have time to do the rest of it.

David Bashevkin: 
That is awesome. My final question, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Pre or post being sick?

David Bashevkin: 
Post.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Yeah, so before when I was an unstoppable 28 year old, 29 year old up to 33, it was like 2:00 in the morning and then 7:00 in the morning, usually not even in pajamas, I’d like fall asleep on my couch reading or studying or writing. Now I’m much more responsible. I would say I’m almost always asleep before 12, let’s say like 11:30. And I wake up probably around 6:45, 6:30, something like that.

David Bashevkin: 
Wow. It catches up to us. Kenayna hara.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
Catches up, yeah.

David Bashevkin: 
And it catches up. Rav Dave/Dovid’l, I cannot thank you enough for speaking with me today. This conversation really on a personal level was so deeply prayerful and I am so grateful for you taking the time to talk with me. So thank you again.

Dovid’l Weinberg: 
A real honor and thank you to everyone for listening.

David Bashevkin: 
There’s a story that I once heard, I think it was from a friend Simcha Willig. It’s such a lovely story. It’s great to visualize it. Somebody is at their first day at a new office and they have their file cabinets and their little brass nameplate and they’re very excited. It’s their first day, they’re starting a career in law or whatever it is. They have their own office for the first time and they’re settling in and all of a sudden there’s a knock on the door and realizing it’s his first day. He doesn’t have any clients, any customers, but you want to look busy, you want to look important. He says, “Hold on one second. Come in.” And he picks up the phone and pretends he’s in the middle of a really important phone call and he’s talking about, yeah, you got to sell the stock, you got to buy more.

I need it by the end of the day and get it in. And then he puts the phone against his chest and he looks at whoever’s at the door and says, “Excuse me, sir. Hold on one second. How can I help you?” And the person at the door looks at them and says, “Hi, we’re from the phone company. We’re we’re here to set up your phone lines.” And there’s this moment of realization that all of this pretend conversation that he was trying to have and project to the world was obviously empty because the very person who was trying to build that connection was obviously at the door. And I think a lot of times about this story in the context of prayer, in the context of our religious lives where so much of our religious life can be imitative, where we’re looking at what would it look like to be in such a conversation, but that inner sincerity of our lives, that inner plea, that inner crisis, that vulnerability that we’re trying to address, the inadequacy of the human condition, that is part of who we are, we often look away from and ignore because it is too painful to really walk into.

And I think so much of the personal prayer as envisioned by Rav Dovid’l is much less about being on fake phone calls and fake cell phone calls and awkward parties where you try to look busy. But it’s the actual work, those subtle moments where you have five minutes, 10 seconds, 15 seconds of sincerity with something real and are able to articulate your own vulnerability, your own desires, your own ambitions, which in and of itself, that active vulnerability can be the greatest act of courage. And I think in some ways that’s the feeling in between the Ayay emtza echad and the Vayay lo emtza. That feeling of where can you God be found and where God can you not be found. The feeling that we’re trapped in this modern world between the mkomcha tamir vnelam, the place of divinity being hidden, concealed, and on the flip side Maleh Kol haretz kavodo, the entire world’s being filled with God’s glory.

And I think it’s in between that absolute inadequacy, lostness, exile, and that feeling of transcendence and intimacy that is really around us at all times where prayer bridges those two and becomes that prophecy in exile where our very search, our very commitment to discovery is already the beginning of a destination. There is a beautiful book on Shnoneh Esrei by Rav Ezra Bick, where he in fact says what my teacher had mentor, I recorded many times Rabbi Moshe Benovitz he presented this patch to me and says, “This is really what 18forty is all about.” He says, “The world of Torah is the world of commanded, of being fixed, of what’s demanded, what you’re responsible for. And there is another world. And that is the world of discovery, of finding it, of reaching forward, of searching forward, and that is the world of tefillah, the world of prayer.”

And I think that if we’re to look at ourselves as having already arrived at being complete and not lacking anything, not needing anything, and turning away from our inherent inadequacy, our inherent wants, desires, and needs, we’ll look at the world almost like that materialist of saying, look, what are we but flesh and blood, the same as a table and a chair, we’re built of the same molecules. But if we’re able to appreciate the divine conversation that envelops our very sense of self, we will realize that life itself is this search. Life itself is this act of discovery and creativity and our true humanity lies in between the question of where can you be found and where can you not be found? And I want to leave you with Rev Dovid’l’s, incredible rendition, as I mentioned in the introduction to Michael Shapiro’s song, which paraphrases much of this beautiful poem Rav Yehuda Halevi. This is Dovid’l Weinberg, Only You.

Dovid’l Weinberg: : 
(singing)

David Bashevkin: 
So thank you so much for listening. This episode, like so many of our episode was edited by our dearest friend Dina Emerson. Thank you once again to our sponsor. This episode was in memory of Rev Eliezer Skaist, alav hashalom generously sponsored by his family. Thank you so much, my dear friend, Rev Dovid for your generous sponsorship.

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Dovid’l Weinberg: 
(singing)