Liturgical linguistics and spontaneous prayer

I’m taking a class entitled “Liturgy,” and we spent the first session talking about the definitions of the words liturgy, worship, ritual, and prayer. In the Greek, liturgy comes from laios/ergon. Laios means people, and ergon is work, or activity. In Latin, it’s from leit/ourgia. Again, leit is people. That’s where lay leader comes from – a leader from amongst the people! And ergon, work/activity, makes sense because we are working to serve God and the people. This is why Jews go to services; in the Temple, we used to serve God through making sacrifices, literally the care and feeding of the deity. It carries over to Hebrew too, because the Hebrew term for prayer is avodah, which is also the modern-day Hebrew word for work!

We also talked about why Jews don’t “do” spontaneous prayer. In Judaism the concept of “order” takes over, because prayer took the place of sacrifice, which was a very ritualized, formal activity. Prayer requires training and education, knowing the right words and choreography. Even when we have silent prayer it’s formalized, set within a specific fixed section of the service. The very word for prayerbook is siddur, and the name of Passover meal is seder; the roots of both words are sin/daled/resh which means “order.” We think that there’s a correct way of doing things, told to us by God in the Torah and then discussed and decided upon by the rabbis. This is in stark contrast to some Protestant denominations (think Pentecostal or Southern Baptist), which have a completely different cultural and religious morphology. There isn’t a set order or book of prayers that are used in services, and spontaneous prayer is highly valued. Of all Christian denominations, Catholicism is closest to Judaism because it too shares highly stylized ritual.

This somehow connected to all of my other classes. In Human Relations, the chaplaincy class, we discussed that when a Christian person is sick in the hospital, very often the chaplain will offer to pray together with that person. In Judaism if we did that “they look at you like you’ve grown a second head.” Why, I thought to myself? Because Jews don’t do spontaneous prayer! You say the Misheberaich prayer (which is standard) for healing, if that (and listen and do other counseling-type things). And then in Homiletics class (sermon writing), we talked about the various ways that congregants of different religions grant their leaders authority. Catholic leaders have authority granted to them by virtue of their place in the Church hierarchy. Jews demonstrate authority by their knowledge of authoritative literature, which is why almost all Jewish sermons quote some kind of text (Bible, Talmud, whatever). And Protestant denominational leaders demonstrate authority by their ability to be close the Holy Spirit. A rabbi would never say, “God spoke to me and said…” but a Baptist preacher might. Why? Because they value spontaneous prayer, they don’t have a culture of fixed ritual!

It all ties together! I think it's fascinating.