Quite different was the service of the priests. Here, what was primary was the sacrifice, not the words. (In fact, though the Levites sang songs at the Temple, and though the priests had a fixed formula of blessing, for the most part the priestly worship took place in silence.) The actions of the priests were precisely regulated. Any deviation, such as the spontaneous offering of Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu, was fraught with danger. The priests did the same thing in the same place at the same time, following a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly cycle. R. Yosi, son of R. Hanina, and R. Joshua benLevi do not disagree on the facts: the patriarchs prayed, the priests offered sacrifice. Here’s the question: To which tradition do our prayers belong?
There is another passage, this time in the Mishnah (Berachot 4:4), suggesting a similar disagreement. Rabban Gamliel states that at each prayer a person should say the “eighteen blessings” (the original form of the Amidah, the standing prayer). Rabbi Joshua says that one should say an “abbreviated eighteen.” Rabbi Eliezer says that if a person makes his prayer “fixed” (keva), it is not a genuine “supplication.”
Later sages, in both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, argue over what exactly Rabbi Eliezer meant. Some suggest he was talking not about the words we say but the way we say them; we should not regard prayer as “a burden” or read it “like one who reads a letter.” Others say that he meant that we should say a new prayer every day, or at least introduce something new into the eighteen blessings. This is a disagreement about the respective places of structure and spontaneity in prayer.
A further argument in the Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah 4:9) concerns the role of the individual as against the community in prayer. The anonymous view in the Mishnah states that “just as the leader of prayer [sh’liach tzibbur] is obligated [to recite the prayer] so each individual is obligated.” Rabban Gamliel, however, holds that “the leader of prayer exempts the individual members” of the congregation.
This cluster of disagreements testifies to a profound difference of opinion as to which tradition of prayer is primary: the priestly or the prophetic. The priest offered sacrifices on behalf of the whole people. His acts were essentially communal and followed a precisely ordered, invariable pattern. The patriarchs and prophets spoke as individuals, spontaneously, as the circumstance required. Rabbi Eliezer, with his opposition to keva, favors the prophetic tradition, as does the view that each individual is obliged to pray.
Rabban Gamliel, with his insistence on a fixed text and his belief that “the leader of prayer” exempts the individual members of the congregation, sees prayer in a priestly perspective. The “leader of prayer” is like a priest, prayer like a sacrifice, and worship an essentially communal act. There are other ways of interpreting these passages, but this is the simplest.
We now understand the disagreement between Maimonides and Nahmanides. For Maimonides, prayer goes back to the dawn of Jewish history. The patriarchs and prophets spoke directly to G-d, each in their own way, and we, by praying, follow in their footsteps.
For Nahmanides, though the patriarchs prayed, they did not set a binding precedent. Throughout the biblical era, the primary form of worship was the sacrifices offered by the priests – first in the Tabernacle, later in the Temple – on behalf of the whole people. When the Temple was destroyed, prayer replaced sacrifice. That is why prayer is only a rabbinic, not a biblical, obligation. It was established by the rabbis in the wake of the destruction.