There’s a practice of studying one page of Talmud a day, called daf yomi (‘a page a day’), which takes one through the entirety of talmudic discourse over seven and a half years. A new cycle began this past week, and a teaching on one of the earliest pages in the tractate Berakhot, blessings, spoke to me.
The sages taught: on account of three things one should not enter a ruin [to pray]: Suspicion, collapse, and demons. (Talmud Berakhot 3a)
The text offers three reasons why we shouldn’t pray in a ruin: It will seem suspicious if we are there, it’s not physically safe, and it’s haunted by demons that will harm us. The text might be saying that if we are in a place of catastrophe, when it feels dangerous for a variety of reasons, we actually cannot pray. It’s not possible - there are too many factors working against us.
When I zoom out and think about this passage as it relates to our lives, I easily think about the difficulties that have recently faced the Jewish world, with the most recent being the stabbing in Monsey over Chanukkah. When there’s been destruction, when there are circumstances that seem unsafe for us as Jews, our instinct might be to pull away entirely, to not pray at all, as the Talmud suggests. We might feel like there are too many factors working against us and it’s just too hard, too complicated, too dangerous to be Jewish.
But the Talmud offers a story about a rabbi who did go into a ruin, among the ruins of Jerusalem, to pray. When asked what he heard there, he replied that he heard God’s voice in the ruin, cooing like a dove. Ever so softly, God’s voice resembled a dove, a symbol for peace. When he was able to actually pray, despite the difficulties of being in a ruin, and when he listened carefully, he found God, and he heard a voice connected to peace. It’s never ideal to be Jewish amidst difficulty and threats. But when we are able to muster the ability, despite the challenges, we must continue to pray. We must continue to delve into our tradition and seek out the voices of peace. We must pray for them with a full heart, listen for them attentively, and amplify those voices of peace.
May we live in a world devoid of this type of catastrophe, a world where we don’t have to wonder if it’s possible to pray.
