[Avodah] Swaying During Prayer and Torah Study

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2016 at 05:14:13PM +0000, Mandel, Seth wrote:
: He also mentions R. Breuer as if it was only the German Jews who did
: not shockle. Everyone knows that RMF and RYBS stood ramrod straight,
: and they were not copying German minhogim. R. Aharon Kotler also stood
: straight. The minhag of shockling is one of the things specifically
: mentioned as a chiddush of the Chasidim.

And yet R' Aryeh Kaplan was also against shukling, saying it inferferes
with proper kavanah. But kayadua, his definition of proper kavanah was
far from that of Yekkes, Litvaks, or post-meditation Chassidus.

I think the role of shukling depends on whether one's emotion in prayer
is expressive or impressive.

To quote R/Dr H Soloveitchik's R&R
<http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm>:
    In 1959, I came to Israel before the High Holidays. Having grown up
    in Boston and never having had an opportunity to pray in a haredi
    yeshivah, I spent the entire High Holiday periodfrom Rosh Hashanah
    to Yom Kippurat a famous yeshiva in Bnei Brak. The prayer there
    was long, intense, and uplifting, certainly far more powerful than
    anything I had previously experienced. And yet, there was something
    missing, something that I had experienced before, something, perhaps,
    I had taken for granted. Upon reflection, I realized that there was
    introspection, self-ascent, even moments of self-transcendence,
    but there was no fear in the thronged student body, most of whom
    were Israeli born.95 Nor was that experience a solitary one. Over
    the subsequent thirty-five years, I have passed the High holidays
    generally in the United States or Israel, and occasionally in England,
    attending services in haredi and non-haredi communities alike. I
    have yet to find that fear present, to any significant degree, among
    the native born in either circle. The ten-day period between Rosh
    Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now Holy Days, but they are not Yamim
    NoraimDays of Awe or, more accurately Days of Dread as they have
    been traditionally called.

    I grew up in a Jewishly non-observant community, and prayed in a
    synagogue where most of the older congregants neither observed the
    Sabbath nor even ate kosher. They all hailed from Eastern Europe,
    largely from shtetlach, like Shepetovka and Shnipishok. Most of their
    religious observance, however, had been washed away in the sea-change,
    and the little left had further eroded in the "new country." Indeed,
    the only time the synagogue was ever full was during the High
    Holidays. Even then the service was hardly edifying. Most didn't
    know what they were saying, and bored, wandered in and out. Yet,
    at the closing service of Yom Kippur, the Ne'ilah, the synagogue
    filled and a hush set in upon the crowd. The tension was palpable
    and tears were shed.

The prayers of his youth were expressive; people were scared, and the
tears of the mispallelim were expressions of existing fear.

What he perceived in that yeshiva and among most shuls he visited
since was impressive. trying to make an impression on themselves. The
emotional content is more what R Yisrael Salanter terms, "hispa'alus",
working yourself up / working on yourself, trying to create the emotional
experience that will make an impression and interanize that fear.

I don't think such hispaalus of artificially trying to summon up the
passion is to be deprecated. Even if the greaer need for it post-rupture
is sad; once needed -- BH people are doing it.

Shukling makes sense in impressive prayer, but it's such an unnatural
way of being emotional it would detract from expressive prayer.

For that matter, that both RSRH and RYBS talk about how lehispallel
is in the hitpa'el (*), and the point of siddur-davening, prayer with
formal liturgy, is impressive -- to internalize what we are supposed
to be concerned with and turning to HQBH for. So hispa'alus emotionality
seems appropriate. Why not shukl, if that helps you personally?

(* Yes, I realize there is an inconsistency in how those two words are
transliterated, but writing diqduq terms in Ashkanzis looked weirder.)

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             How wonderful it is that
micha at aishdas.org        nobody need wait a single moment
http://www.aishdas.org   before starting to improve the world.
Fax: (270) 514-1507              - Anne Frank Hy"d