I just had the pleasure of skimming through Rabbi Shmuel Jablon's curriculum for Bi'ur Tefillah, and thought it was absolutely wonderful. On a personal level, one major motivation for my own preoccupation with the topic of kavvanah in tefillah was my experience as a teacher in an excellent American Jewish day school (which of course included minyan in the morning), and then subsequently as a teacher in Israeli middle schools and high schools. If only I had been able to use Rabbi Jablon's material then as a teacher...
In his response to that post, Rabbi Hayman writes that "this is not an age that knows how to pray" and suggests that dealing with prayer in metaphorical ways is the right approach. Rabbi Jablon's very personal way of teaching prayer to middle school students is of course far from that kind of approach.
I am quite skeptical about the claim that "our age" doesn't know how to pray (with meaning) as opposed to earlier generations that did. Furthermore, if common Jews did indeed know how to pray with meaning in previous generations, I would suggest that it is precisely because they were *not* taught the rationalistic approach which claims that prayer is for man, not for God, and the associated idea that God included a naturalistic mechanism within the universe, which allows for sincere prayer to be answered without "affecting" God himself. Rabbi Hayman is quite correct that these two ideas are essentially one.
I think that this approach advocated by Rabbi Hayman is a very important one for some people and for some students (though I tend to think it more appropriate to teach in high school and beyond than in middle school). But it is certainly not for everyone, nor necessarily for most people, and it seems odd to describe it as the approach which *must* be taught. For that matter, while prophecy, aggadah, and prayer are surely replete with poetry, symbolism, and metaphor as Rabbi Hayman states, is it really true that they mean nothing literal in any way at all?
For expanded thoughts on if and why our generation is unique in that it doesn't know how to pray, and on the place of the rationalistic approach among many other valid Jewish approaches, please see the following review essay (which appeared a couple of years ago under the auspices of LookJed):
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listserv.os.biu.ac.il]
For an academic study of the rationalistic approach described by Rabbi Hayman, as it developed historically among late Spanish rishonim (who gave it its clearest expression), there is a chapter on this in my dissertation which will be published online God willing in the coming months.
Seth Kadish
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Seth (Avi) Kadish אבי קדיש
Karmiel, Israel כרמיאל
Webpage - [
sites.google.com]
