The original version of this essay was published by Camp Tawonga on September 24, 2020 and can be found here. It has since been revised.
In an American culture that thrives off of novelty and an economy that runs on capturing your attention, boredom is just about the worst possible thing. Boredom is painful and expensive – a waste of time. And it just so happens that I know more about boredom than the average bear. See, I teach Hebrew school.
Specifically, I teach 6th and 7th graders who are preparing to become Bar/Bat/B Mitzvah. This means that I am constantly competing with the idea that Jewish education is boring – or worse, irrelevant. I do what any good teacher does: I desperately bend over backwards to show the next generation that Jewish tradition is wise and awe-inspiring and crucial to their lives today – all of which I sincerely believe.
In particular, I try to make t’filah – prayer services – engaging and fresh. I want my students to know that there are many different ways to pray. Prayer can be singing or silence. Prayer can be noticing a bee buzzing in a garden. Prayer can be reading ancient text. Prayer can be writing new poetry. T’filah is the hardest time for many students to focus, and I work hard to keep it as shiny as possible to ward off that immortal, lurking foe we call Boredom. Sometimes I do this even at the expense of much needed, good ole fashioned repetition.
One day, while thinking about this challenge I constantly face, I did a little research about how prayer is understood in Jewish texts. You will never believe the gem I found! Here it is, from the Jerusalem Talmud 2:4.
“Rabbi Hiya said: ‘I never concentrated during prayer in all my days. Once I wanted to concentrate, but I thought about who will meet the king first: the Arkafta [a Persian high official] or the Exilarch [the leader of the Jewish people in Babylon for a time]?’
Shmuel said, ‘I count clouds [during prayer.]’
R. Bun bar Hiyah said ‘I count the layers of stones in the wall [while I pray].’
R. Matnaya said ‘I am grateful to my head, because it bows by itself when I reach Modim [a prayer of gratitude].’”1
This is a text about rabbis admitting that during daily prayer, they are bored! They wonder about the future, count the clouds, and even doze off. But why do they pray at all if they are not actually doing it? It would be different if Rabbi Hiya said he daydreamed every once in a while, but he says, “I never concentrated.” Keep in mind, this is a rabbi, not a kid who is being forced or heavily bribed to attend. What is going on here?
What if, in some way, prayer is supposed to be boring?
Boredom is the initial state from which so many creations and fond memories come. In thinking of how to entertain ourselves, we often end up creating art and music and poetry and more that can be shared. As a kid, when boredom started to creep in, I often reached for my markers and drew. Or, I turned on the radio, put on a cowboy hat and would dance around my room as I sort of put my clothes away.
I think we fear taking the chance of boredom because we don’t know what will happen on the other side. Instead, we put our minds on a sort of imagination life support: binge watching TV every single spare moment. No space for our imaginations to putz around.
We are afraid. What if our minds wander into places we don’t want to go? What if our minds stumble into a Charybdis-style vortex of despair? Or what if our minds just sort of sit there, on the couch, like little home bodies? Who knows! But if we don’t at least accept the gift (and luxury) of boredom every once in a while, we deny our imaginations the chance to explore their own potential. Not to mention, pulling ourselves out of boredom (instead of relying on something external to entertain us) helps us exercise our creative problem solving muscles. The problem: I’m bored. The solution: what am I going to do about it?
Boredom also forces us to face deeply important questions: how do I want to spend my time? How do I want this day to look? Do I want to look back on my life in 40 years and say I spent 50% of my waking hours scrolling down social media? Annie Dillard writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Let’s come back to prayer. Instead of thinking about how prayer might be boring, let’s flip this on its head. Consider: boredom is prayer. Boredom is another kind of connection to ourselves and definitely a spiritual challenge. It was the French philosopher Blaise Pascal who famously said, “All of humanity's problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Arguably, Pascal is describing a sort of boredom – an aloneness in the room of our minds.
What if, when praying or sitting in services, we didn’t try to solve boredom but instead surrendered to it? What if we just sat or stood there and “counted clouds?” What might we experience or learn? How might this be a sort of prayer for our imaginations?
So for a least a moment this coming Yom Kippur, may God forbid you actually pray. Seize some time for yourself to be bored. Reframe those seconds, minutes (may you be gifted hours) as holy time.
Blessed is boredom.