Between his trav­els around the world, Rab­bi Morde­cai Schreiber is set to pub­lish his lat­est book, Why Peo­ple Pray, lat­er this month. He is guest blog­ging here all week as part of the Vis­it­ing Scribe series on The ProsenPeo­ple.

As a retired rab­bi and long-time author, I accept­ed an invi­ta­tion to serve as rab­bi and dis­cus­sion facil­i­ta­tor on cruise ships. For twelve years I sailed the Sev­en Seas and vis­it­ed about a hun­dred and islands on and off of every con­ti­nent. Wher­ev­er I was, vis­it­ing hous­es of wor­ship and observ­ing peo­ple of all faiths at prayer drew my attention.

There is a com­mon pre­sump­tion today that reli­gion is on the decline and that less and less peo­ple pray. I found the oppo­site to be true. In the for­mer Sovi­et Union, in main­land Chi­na, in the Mus­lim and in the Bud­dhist worlds, and through­out Latin Amer­i­ca, I wit­nessed large num­bers of peo­ple pour­ing their hearts out in prayer. I found myself ask­ing why? Why is it that in an era dom­i­nat­ed by sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, steeped in mate­ri­al­ism, where peo­ple are seek­ing instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, so many peo­ple con­tin­ue to ask for help and reas­sur­ance from a tran­scen­den­tal force that remains elu­sive and unknown?

I grew up in a time and place where Jews hard­ly ever set a foot inside a syn­a­gogue: Haifa in the 1940s and ​‘50s, in what became Israel. In the open­ing part of his book The Source, James Mich­en­er describes how, upon arrival in Haifa har­bor, one sees a Baha’i tem­ple as well as church­es and mosques, but no syn­a­gogues. As a child, I was not taught how to pray. But since Haifa hap­pened to be a micro­cosm of world reli­gions, and since, from a young age, I was deeply inter­est­ed in my people’s past, I found my own way to pray. Lat­er, when I went to the Unit­ed States to study jour­nal­ism, my inter­est shift­ed to reli­gion, and I became a rab­bi and a stu­dent of religions.

I was always intrigued by prayer and by ques­tions such as, ​“Is any­one lis­ten­ing?” ​“Does prayer make a dif­fer­ence?” and so on. And there were always aspects of for­mal prayer that trou­bled me, such as ask­ing God to pun­ish my adver­saries, or pray­ing for per­son­al gain. I always felt that much of for­mal prayer had become anti­quat­ed and did not keep up with our chang­ing world. Most of all, I have always been aware of the fail­ure of prayer to bring peo­ple of dif­fer­ent cul­tures and creeds togeth­er, but rather seemed to dri­ve a wedge between dif­fer­ent belief systems.

Rab­bi, author, edu­ca­tor, writer, trans­la­tor, pub­lish­er, Bib­li­cal schol­ar, and founder of Schreiber Trans­la­tions, Rab­bi Morde­cai Schreiber has sailed the Sev­en Seas as a spir­i­tu­al leader aboard cruise ships, with over fifty books pub­lished under his pen­name, Mor­ry Sofer. He is tour­ing through the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil for the 2016 – 2017 sea­son as a JBC Net­work author.

Relat­ed Content:

• Bruce J. Hill­man: A Bite of the Apple
• Michael Gold­ing: A Sacred Space
• Leah Vin­cent: A Jew­ish Athe­ist’s Prayer