Learning from the inside out

It all started when I was in my late twenties. My then-rabbi was always fuming about the siddur/prayer book that the synagogue I was attending at the time was using, on the grounds that non-Orthodox siddurim were divisive, preventing Jews from non-Orthodox denominations from being able to walk into a shul anywhere in the world and join in the prayers. So I took him up on his challenge, and spend several months--yes, months--teaching myself to davven/pray the Orthodox version of the Sh'ma section and the weekday Amidah prayer from an Orthodox siddur. (For the record, it was a Birnbaum siddur, and I still have it, though I generally davven from a Koren Sacks, these days.)

Fast-forward to a different neighborhood, a different synagogue, and a different rabbi. This one taught me that there are some parts of the service that are more important than others. He called the most important section the Matbeiah shel Tefillah, which I understood to mean the hard-core required prayers. That section starts with Bar'chu (or, without a minyan, "Yotzer Or" in the Shacharit/Morning Service, "HaMaariv aravim" in the Maariv/Arvit/Evening Service, or the Amidah itself for Minchah/Afternoon Service) and ends with the end of the Amidah (or, I presume, Hallel on a Festival). But he said that one should add at least one "prayer" before the Matbeiah, preferably the Ashrei psalm, and one after, preferably the Aleinu prayer. It would be probably roughly another 15 years before I realized that he was using Minchah as his template.

These two rabbis had a profound influence on my siddur learning. They taught me the importance of being able to pick up a siddur anywhere and pray, and the importance of, well, knowing what's the most important.

As a child and teenager, the only prayers that I learned in Hebrew were the first paragraph of the Sh'ma and the parts of the service that my parents' congregation sang aloud. I davvened everything else in English. Due to the influence of these two former rabbis of mine, not only did I make it a point to learn to davven in Hebrew from an Orthodox siddur, so that I could davven anywhere, but I learned the prayers in order of importance, rather than in order of appearance. That second rabbi even taught me which psalms in P'sukei D'Zimrah were more important than others.

Some "newcomers"--Jewishly-undereducated Jews like me, baalei/baalot t'shuvah ("returnees" to Orthodox Judaism), and/or Jews by Choice--do it the hard way: They pick up a siddur and try to learn all the prayers from the very beginning. Me, I'm still learning new parts of the prayerbook to this day. (Malka Esther's and Larry's rabbinical-student guest was understandably puzzled when I mentioned that my latest accomplishment was learning Tefillah L'Moshe/Psalm 90--as a guy who's been buried in Gemara studies for years, he couldn't understand that, for an Am HaAretz/Jewishly-illiterate person, learning a psalm can be a big deal.) I get away with this because I started with the most important prayers first. If I skip part of the P'sukei D'Zimrah section, it's not the end of the world. But if I miss Bar'chu because I'm still saying P'sukei D'Zimrah, what sense does that make? Since when is a psalm as important as a part of the service for which a minyan is required? The minute the baal(at) tefillah/prayer leader gets to Yishtabach, that's the end of my P'sukei D'Zimrah--I will not miss Bar'chu!

The same priorities applied when we were raising our son. We taught him Kiddush first, then Vay'chulu, then Shalom Aleichem. Yes, that's the reverse order. But what's most important?

Bottom line: If you can't learn everything at once, don't try. Just start with the most important things, then go back and learn the rest later. Don't worry. It took me years to learn the Musaf Amidah for Festivals, and even more years to learn all of P'sukei D'Zimrah, but I finally got there. You've got a whole lifetime to do this, so relax.