My lead essay for this issue originated in an
independent-study graduate course, and it is gratifying to see it enter the
ongoing conversation of Textual Reasoning. I am grateful to and honored by all those who have contributed to this
volume; their essays have both complicated and illuminated the profundity of
the act of prayerful address. Reflecting on all of the pieces together, I am
struck by the recurrence of three principal paradoxes: the identity of the
addressee, the question of speech versus silence, and the role of names and
predicates. Here, I offer concluding and summarizing reflections on the
participants' varying perspectives on these central themes.
The paradox of the addressee
Whom does one address in prayer? The analyses
presented in this issue give different answers to this question; their very
diversity points to the fact that the address of prayer tends to break down the
down the normal conceptual distinctions among first-person, second-person, and
third-person utterances. For instance, Newton asks, "Can 'You' be said by 1st
persons to the Jewish God without necessarily referring both Him and them to
the 3rd person neighbors who are each other's ever-present company?"
Typically, a second-person address excludes the third-person, and vice-versa,
but the 'odd' address of prayer must somehow contain both together. Likewise,
Kepnes' reading of Cohen shows us that the first person is also an object of
prayer, as liturgical engagement calls forth one's ethical self. In a sense,
we can say that the address to 'you' is simultaneously an address to the 'I'
that the pray-er strives to become. All three grammatical 'persons' are
therefore simultaneously addressed or referred in a single utterance. They
cannot be separated, and to neglect or abandon any one of them is also to neglect
and abandon the others.
As a result, any attempt to determine the
relative priority of these persons gives rise to further strange results. For
instance, both Newton and Kepnes emphasize the ways in which the presence of
third persons precedes and enables the second-person address of prayer. Noting
the first-person plural formulation ("we") of Jewish prayer, Newton argues that
a proper saying of 'you' can only take place within a prayer community. Similarly,
Kepnes proposes that the ethical self (who addresses the second person in
prayer) can only arise out of and be preserved within a communal cultural-linguistic
system. For both, one must be in the position of saying 'you' to human others
before one can say 'you' to the divine other. In contrast, my essay argued
that the saying of 'you' in prayer can enable the saying of 'you' in community.
That is, the ethicizing practice of addressing the mere-'you' can help one to treat
human others as persons, transforming them from 'its' into 'yous'. Which,
then, truly has priority? Does one move from the divine other to the human
others, or from the humans others to the divine other? Perhaps, in a further
oddness of prayer's 'you,' the two may be mutually dependent, so that one
cannot assign ultimate priority to one over the other.
Katz's essay provides a practical corollary to
these theoretical questions of interdependence. She compares the utterances
directed towards a divine other with utterances directed towards a
civic-collective other, showing the ways in which prayer or declaration of
faith can have unintended negative consequences. The Pledge of Allegiance,
while directed towards abstract notions of "the flag the United States of America" and "the republic for which it stands," also strives to heighten
concern for one's fellow-citizens by demanding "liberty and justice for all."
Yet, she argues, this same Pledge can also produce distortions, by creating
unthinking attitudes among those who utter it (thus dehumanizing the first
person through ethical abdication) and by excluding 'others' through the
polarizing inclusion of "under God" (thus undermining relations among the third
persons of the civic community). These same dangers also apply to prayer:
while the paradoxical interdependence of person means that address to the
second person can also ethicize one's relations to self and to human others, a
distorted form of prayer can corrode those same relations. Katz highlights the
need for practices that could help prevent these distortions, extending the
Jewish notion of kavanah to the American civic realm and reminding us
that the words of the Pledge are not sufficient in themselves. Unlike
objective forms of deictic address, in which a proper external situation is all
that is needed (for example, "You have red hair" is a valid utterance, as long
as one is standing before a red-haired person), the fixed words of the Pledge,
like those of prayer, require a certain ethical inward comportment for their
validity. In this sense, she demonstrates the ways in which the paradoxical
indeterminacy of prayer's address calls for special responsibilities and
concentration on the part of the pray-ers.
The paradox of speaking
Who is the speaker in the act of prayer? Before
a transcendent addressee, is a mere human being even capable of speaking at
all? Magid's commentary on the GRA's remarks asserts that speech and silence (as
commonly understood) are both inadequate; rather, prayer requires the oxymorons
of "silent speech" and "spoken silence." As expounded by the GRA via Magid,
the utterance of the prelude to the Amidah ("Adonai, open my lips…") "conjoins
the Skekhina with the worshipper." In this theatrical portrayal, the
worshipper can speak only by speaking as someone else; in a sense, the
worshipper cannot speak until it is not the worshipper, but rather the Shekhina,
who speaks. Yet, viewed differently, it is the worshipper whose mouth
is opened and who utters the prayer. As such, the identity of the speaker
cannot be determinately identified. Likewise, what is known as the silent
Amidah "actually…constitutes the spoken word of the worshipper," while in the
spoken repetition of the Amidah, the worshipper is silenced as the cantor (as
representative of the congregation) speaks. In these examples, speaking and
non-speaking must somehow occur simultaneously, even though this is logically
'impossible'; what is normally an either-or here becomes a necessary both-and.
The complementary insights of Dickey and Newton corroborate the ways in which an analysis of prayer produces antinomies with regard
to the act of speaking. Drawing on previous Jewish commentators, Newton suggests that "in some sense, God's infinitude and transcendence moots the prayer's
presumptuousness and perhaps better merits silence." In this sense, while we
finite humans can speak about empirical matters of the everyday world, the
notion of speaking about, much less to, an infinite God seems a super-human
task of which few would be capable. Conversely, Dickey argues that the very
non-finitude of the mere-'you' is precisely what makes all human beings
capable of speaking in prayer: The addressee of prayer "is so inherently
salient (so 'present,' in any context) that…further contextual specification is
unnecessary. God is present, automatically, in any context, for anyone uttering
a prayer." In this sense, prayer would be the least presumptuous form
of speech. My sense is that Dickey and Newton are both right, and that the
nature of prayer's address is best explicated by preserving both positions together,
despite their 'incompatibility.'
The paradox of names and predicates
Does the use of specific divine names and predicates add to
or detract from the act of prayer? Are such specifications necessary or
extraneous? In Plevan's presentation of Buber, the use of a particular name
for God is no mere linguistic marker, but contains a specific and significant
meaning: "[T]he divine name reveals the divine character, and knowing the
meaning of the divine name makes a divine-human encounter possible." The
rabbinic practice of not pronouncing the God's name would thus undermine that
encounter, so that "the standard translation of the phrase, adonai eloheinu,
'Lord our God,' seems to say nothing at all. It is not at all clear who is
being addressed." In contrast, my essay argued for the benefits of the
rabbinic not-naming and emphasized the idolatrous dangers inherent in naming.
Once again, as in the case of speech vs. silence, it may be the case that there
is no single good solution to this dilemma. Buber is right, and the rabbis are
also right; pronouncing a name is problematic, and not pronouncing a name is
problematic. If this paradox is real, it might teach us there is no 'safe' way
of addressing God; rather, prayer requires a constant attentiveness to
contradictory perspectives that can never be reconciled.
One can take a similar approach to the question
of specifying predicates. Criticizing the idea of a mere-'you', Rashkover claims
that such predicates are essential, because "a 'wholly other' deity is so
removed from anything human that it becomes impossible to speak of this deity
in any meaningful way, including the reference to it as the 'you' whom we
address in prayer." While Rashkover argues that a wholly other deity would
preclude address, my essay maintains that the addressee must be wholly
other in order to be addressed as 'you.' These positions appear to be
incompatible: is the 'wholly otherness' of the addressee demanded, or is it
excluded? Rashkover's argument makes sense, in that the closer, more similar, and
more familiar something is, the more naturally we are able to relate to it. In
contrast, the more different something is, the less we are able to relate to
it. Pushing this to the extreme, if something is radically different and
wholly other, we would not be able to relate to it at all. However, from
another perspective, one can argue that saying 'you' requires that the
addressee remain different and unfamiliar. To be sure, a person's physical features
(e.g. the person's eye color, hair length, or the sound of his or voice) might
be similar to my own, or at least familiar to me. However, even when I know
someone well, the part of them that I address by 'you' remains completely ungraspable
and non-comprehensible. Without that irremediable otherness, the addressee would
be an 'it' and not a 'you'. Thus, it is not only the divine addressee that
must be 'wholly other,' but also every human addressee—in Jacques Derrida's
formulation, "Tout autre est tout autre," "Every other is absolutely
other."[1]
Furthermore, Dickey's essay points out that the complete lack of specification
for prayer's divine addressee can actually add to the closeness and presentness
of the relation. In this sense, one could say that the addressee of prayer is radically
present precisely by being radically transcendent. Again, if both
perspectives are cogent, then predicates would be both necessary and
unnecessary. As such, a practical implementation of this paradox could pronounce
the predicates and recognize them as necessary, while also recognizing that
they are not objectively or universally valid; rather, they gain validity through
the worshipper's act of uttering them with kavanah and intention.
Rashkover's criticism of my essay is thus dialectically warranted and can serve
as an important corrective: if an account of prayer comes across as
under-emphasizing the predicates, then they ought to be emphasized more.
Conversely, if such an account comes across as under-emphasizing the full
sufficiency of the 'you'-alone, then that ought to be emphasized more.
However, in accord with the paradoxical logic of the 'you' of prayer, neither
ought to be emphasized to the exclusion or negation of the other.
Conclusion
While some would be inclined to treat these paradoxes as
merely apparent and would accordingly seek to resolve their contradictions, I
have deliberately presented them here as unresolved and unresolvable. That is
to say, while conceptual contradictions may sometimes be the result of unclear
thinking, they may, in other cases, be a proper and expected consequence of a
fundamentally vague subject matter. With regard to the topic at hand, it may
be that the second-person address of prayer may produce conceptual
multiplicity when viewed through the lens of third-person theorization and
analysis. Put differently, the subject matter of the prayer's address may
"overflow" the bounds of any single consistent conceptualization. Peter Ochs'
piece points to this possibility by arguing that my essay lends itself to
multiple "contradictory" readings; because of the "epistemic vagueness" of the
thesis, he suggests, any given reading must be placed dialogically alongside
its "opposite." This openness to different readings was, in fact, one of my
intentions when I wrote the essay; however, this feature also means that my
essay was insufficient and incomplete in itself. Without the conversation and
dialogue of other participants' divergent perspectives, the internal conceptual
contradictions of the 'you' of prayer could not be explicitly depicted. Thus,
rather feeling the need to resolve the multiplicity of the different essays in
this issue, we can view their very non-consistency as necessary for a fuller
account of prayer's address, in all its paradoxicality and oddness.[2]
