I taught this for Parashat Noach in 5781 (2020), sometime after accidentally stumbling into this teaching in a book of the Baal Shem Tov’s comments about the Torah. In the section on Noach, he inserts a long treatise on prayer.
I want to share a teaching of the Baal Shem Tov about tefillah, about prayer, that he links to Parashat Noach.
The Baal Shem Tov was the founder of chasidism and like all of our mystics saw the Torah as a metaphor for the experience of the soul. He picks up on the word for ark in Hebrew, תֵּיבָה tayva, which in Talmudic Hebrew is a word for “word.” So the Baal Shem Tov sees Noach and the ark as a teaching about words, particularly words of prayer.
The Kabbalah says that the world around Noach was not just evil but a chaos of words, where words could be spoken but not understood clearly and where the power of particular words could not take root. The ark, the תֵּיבָה tayva in contrast, has form and structure, and holds off the confusion. The way the Torah describes the תֵּיבָה tayva is sort of a diagram for a sturdy word in an environment like that.
The Divine instructed Noach: Make yourself a תֵּיבָה and make it with compartments, and line it on the inside and outside with pitch… Make a window for light for the תֵּיבָה, and put a cover on it one cubit above it, and put an opening for the תֵּיבָה in the side, and make a lower compartment, a second lower compartment and a third lower compartment for it. (Genesis 6:14, 16)
So you’re picturing the תֵּיבָה tayva not as a kind of boat or cruise ship like in our kids’ books, but really as a box with inside levels and compartments, and three levels of decks, and an opening above that has a canopy, and an opening to the side.
The Baal Shem Tov teaches that this is how we make a word of prayer: Whatever word we find in a prayer, or recite in a prayerful way, is made up of three levels that he calls worlds, souls, and divinity or God-ness. Worlds is the level closest to the surface — it’s the way we know that word in the world.
Think of our typical word of prayer, whether it’s love or peace or ancestors, healing or rejoicing or praising. There is a picture of what that means in our experience, either of something we know or the picture of how we yearn for that thing. That’s the first lower deck, the deck of the world.
Beneath that is the level of soul in the word. Each word has a deeper meaning, a more distilled and pure possibility. Again we can take love or peace or ancestors or rejoicing and move beyond the familiar picture or the individual prayer we think we have, and we can ask what really is love and where have I known about it more profoundly, where love is truly love, and not just love what is familiar but love that is broader than that. Or where joy is more the moment that brings joy, but the kinds of things that sustain joy or that are a deeper joy.
And beneath that level, even deeper on the third level, is divinity, which I doubt I understand, where all true prayers are the same and connect all of us to the source of everything. I’m not at all sure how to express that.
For the Baal Shem Tov, building an ark is building a container that reclaims a word that we want to pray or that we find in a prayer book, redeeming it from the confusion of the storm around us where the idea of the word isn’t clear or it’s lost. The practice is to focus on that word, and to focus on it and eliminate the chaos around it so we can actually connect to the divinity in that word. The word is insulated inside and out, so it can be itself and not undermined by the waters outside.
There are two openings, a door closed at the side where the water is pushing and whooshing, and a window open at the top with a canopy over it. The door at the side is where we feel the pressure of the world without being drowned by it, and that pressure sometimes tells us what the word is we should be praying, the prayer we should be saying. You can feel the door and what’s pushing on it, and it can tell you the word that you should be bringing inside. Maybe it’s an opening where you can safely see out into the storm without being in it for the moment.
The opening at the top, the Baal Shem Tov says is a reminder that a prayer has to be more than sideways, it has to raise our eyes upward and straighten us up. The reason he says there is a canopy is sort of like the top of a Sukkah — if there was just an opening and a sky, we wouldn’t perceive that the word is going anywhere, but the canopy represents God coming down, so to speak, and receiving our prayer, or acknowledging that our words are trying to be lifted up.
And finally the Baal Shem Tov says that this is all very hard, but the crucial thing is the first step, which is what he calls kavvanah or intention. You don’t have to know already the deeper decks to each prayer or each word, you just have to want to say them this way. Then the Divine supplies the connection between the words and the Divine provides the illumination through the upper window and the Divine helps us reach toward the deepest level of divinity in a particular word.
I find this guidance of the Baal Shem Tov useful when I come to services feeling like some concern is storming in me, or just like things are whirling all around, and I can try to go into the תֵּיבָה tayva and ask myself what is the word I am trying to say, and then if I can find it I can go to work trying to understand its deeper levels — its surface level of what I’m experiencing now, its soul and why this word is speaking to me now, what’s really at the root of it and what it’s trying to pull out of me. It’s a way of ackwnowledging feeling boxed in, and doing תֵּיבָה tayva work in order to come out.
Sometimes when I don’t know what to pray, what I want to pray, I just look in the Siddur for any word to focus on, or for some of the words that in the past have called out to me,and I stay on that, trying to find the layers of it for the particular day.
This is all easier to do in a meditative, focused practice than in a group prayer service but you can do it here too. Don’t feel like you have to be reciting or singing the same phrase or be on the same page. Think about your own ark, your own תֵּיבָה tayva, the word you are trying to say in all its levels and layers. Turn whatever is on your mind into a deeper and clearer prayer, a prayer that is an ark, lifting your eyes and shoulders even in a storm.
Leave a Reply