Spiritual and Practical:

A New Approach to Teaching Tefillah

By Lev Metz

How many Jewish educators have sat with their classes during a tefillah service,

less than satisfied with either the content of the service or how their students respond to

it? Despite the “training” that they receive in order to successfully perform their bar or

bat mitzvah according to the standards of their community, few of our students are really

familiar with tefillah - neither the basic structure of the liturgy nor the lessons of the

prayers themselves.

In many cases, students’ active disengagement from tefillah is a reflection of their

school or community’s approaches to prayer and education. Generally in supplementary

Religious Schools some formal instruction is given on how to participate in specific

prayers, but no concerted effort is made to acculturate the students to a community that

prays with intention, or even at all. Looking to alternative models of experiential

education we can formulate a new approach to teaching tefillah that puts the prayer

experience at the center of a lesson, unit or year-long curriculum. This model of teaching

tefillah can be adapted to suit any institution that wants to explore the value tefillah can

bring to their community.

In order to help students to connect with tefillah and be familiar with the liturgy

they need to participate in regular prayer services. Instituting a mandatory weekly (if not

more often) tefillah service for supplementary Religious Schools helps to establish

tefillah as a normative Jewish practice within the community. Beyond the goal of

acculturation, the service itself can become the major vehicle for teaching about the
service, with supplementary classroom components facilitated both before and after the

service.

The character and nature of the services themselves should be dynamic, changing

regularly and intentionally focusing on a particular prayer or theme that parallels what is

being taught in the classroom. These themes could be determined according to the

community’s values (via the Religious School Committee or its equivalent), which will

both challenge the community to articulate its values alongside the clergy as well as help

to bring a widespread buy-in for the program among community members.

Acculturating students to the tefillah experience will require a dynamic balance

between instruction on how Jews pray (utilizing first the community’s siddur and

eventually other media) and an exploration of why we do so. It is our responsibility to

show our students the possibilities that tefillah can provide for them. Spiritually, tefillah

can provide a ballast to balance out such pervasive American cultural norms as

materialism and narcissism. Educationally, tefillah provides a lens and window through

which we can connect to Jews around the world - past, present and future. An endless

amount of information including ethics, the Bible, Israel, history and social action and

can be spun around the Jewish prayer service.

The supplementary classroom component would ideally be organized and bound

(at least among the higher grades) to the services in which the students participate. David

Kolb1 offers a strong model on how to structure the learning so that the tefillah

experience is central and informative. He identifies four components to the cycle of

experiential education: 1) Concrete experience, 2) Observation and reflection, 3) Forming

abstract concepts and 4) Testing in new situations. I would add a preliminary step to
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Kolb, www.infed.org/biblio/b-explrn.htm
Kolb’s model - a component (either large or small) of formal instruction focusing on a

particular prayer or concept before engaging in the actual prayer experience. In this way,

a teacher would introduce a concept or work on a prayer with the students and then

accompany them to a tefillah service that intentionally incorporates the topic of the day.

After tefillah, students will engage in a process of reflection in response to specific

questions and articulate lessons based on what they experienced before attending another

tefilla 띨2 service.

What sort of effect could a program like this have on a Religious School? 훅 I

expect that over the course of several years a synagogue employing this approach would

see a substantial increase in post-Religious School activities such as youth groups and

confirmation classes. More importantly, they will have provided a cadre of young Jews

with the keys to our history and heritage, a connection to the worldwide Jewish people

through tefillah and a strong model for leading an engaging spiritual life in the

community.

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