Well of Living Insight: Comments on the Siddur

Yes, each day’s desire is different; so is each day’s prayer. But the words remain the same, as they have for centuries. That is their power. The kavvanah, the intensity of love and desire, that has been deposited into these words over so many generations, is never lost.

Y-H-W-H is with me always. When I say that I am a religious person, that is what I mean.

Prayer, then, is about listening as much as it is about speaking. “Let your ear hear what your mouth is saying!” the rabbis teach regarding the proper way to recite the shemaʿ. If “prayer itself is of the essence of divinity,” the whole process of prayer is a holy one, taking place inside us and around us.

Each day, as we tie these straps around our fingers like rings, we recall that we are all baʿaley teshuvah, returnees who have been invited back into this relationship of great trust and intimacy, even though we may not feel that we deserve it. The One who knows us better than we know ourselves believes in our penitence more than we do.

What happens after prayer is the most important question to address to your life as a praying person.

What, then, can it mean to come into that presence, since it is always there? To pray is to choose a particular time and place to notice that presence, when I stop everything else I am doing,

the One can never be “captured” by the finite human mind; it had already been liberated even from that name in a prior verse (Exodus 3:14), where the voice says “‘I shall be whatever I shall be.’ If you think you’ve ‘got’ Me by naming me ‘Is-Was-Will Be,’ I will fly out of that nominal box and become a verb again!”

At the heart of this commentary lies a central message: the inner life (penimiyyut) is real, precious, accessible, and at times revelatory; and the most important, fundamental, guiding realizations we might cultivate through its development in prayer are those of sacred Oneness and love.

To be able to pray one must alter the course of consciousness…one must adjust oneself to another way and another atmosphere of thinking.”