Little does contemporary religion ask of humanity. It is ready to offer comfort; it has no courage to challenge. It is ready to offer edification; it has no courage to break idols, to shatter callousness.

The trouble is that religion has become "religion" - institution, dogma, ritual. It is no longer an event ... It is customary to blame secular science and antireligious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.

When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living foundation; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, "The Insecurity of Freedom," p 3-4.

The true motivation for prayer is not, as it has been said, the sense of being at home in the universe, but rather the sense of not being at home in the universe.

Is there a sensitive heart that could stand indifferent and feel at home in the sight of so much evil and suffering, in the face of countless failures to live up to the will of G-d? On the contrary, the experience of not being at home in the world is a motivation for prayer.

The experience gains intensity in the amazing awareness that G-d himself is not at home in the universe. He is not at home in a universe where His will is defied and where His kingship is denied. G-d is in exile; the world is corrupt. The universe itself is not at home.

To pray means to bring G-d back into the world, to establish His kingship for a second at least. To pray means to expand His presence.

Abraham Joshua Heschel says it is a fact that in certain places prayer is of consequence. The leaders, the community, approach prayer as if it matters, not as a gimmick for Jewish continuity, not for social purposes, to bring kids within Yiddishkayt. Prayer as prayer matters. If prayer doesn't matter, then why are we doing this? Why are we wasting our time if these words and these prayers don't matter?

BJ's rabbis believe [that prayer] must be first experienced emotionally and spiritually, rather than understood intellectually and analytically. Consequently, even though many members have only limited knowledge of Hebrew and many do not come from observant backgrounds, there is little instruction or step-by-step explanation of the liturgy at services. Increasing Jewish literacy is important, but it is a separate activity from prayer that is "of consequence." "Learning," Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein explains, “is understood with your mind. Prayer is understood with your soul.” Or, as Rabbi Roly Matalon put it, "Tefillah is not a class." Their goal is for congregants to be so moved by the experience of prayer that they will be inspired to study and take advantage of the panoply of educational opportunities offered by the synagogue.

Instead of didactically instructing the congregation, the rabbis see themselves as "spiritual cables" who, through their own emotional involvement in prayer and their Kavanah (intention in prayer), model, inspire, and guide the prayer of the congregation. Rabbi Roly explained the importance of rabbis genuinely praying with their congregations by referring to a passage in Heschel's Man's Quest for God:

Such an atmosphere [of prayer] is not created by ceremonies, gimmicks or speeches, but by the example of prayer, by a person who prays. You create the atmosphere not around you but within you. I am a congregant and I know from personal experience how different the situation is when the rabbi is concerned with prayer instead of with how many people attend the service; the difference in a service in which the rabbi comes prepared to respond to thirty centuries of Jewish experience and one in which he comes to review the book of the month or the news of the day.

The rabbis own engagement in prayer is most obvious in the physical, at times ecstatic, worship that is part of most services. They are bodily and emotionally involved with the liturgy: the rabbis close their eyes often, they clap, they move to the music while pounding out the beat on the bimah with their fists, and at times they lift their arms in a Hasidic gesture of simultaneously raising the level of excitement and transporting the congregation to a higher level.