The Ansche Chesed blog is a place where you can find enriching material to read about God, Torah and the Jewish People.
Last week I posted about standing physically still during the Amidah, as a technique for spiritual focus. As everyone knows, however, there is a long tradition of swaying back and forth – in Yiddish to shuckel – in prayer and study. Do these two techniques go together? To illustrate the tension, check out this Talmudic… Read more »
Our central prayer is known by the instructive term Amidah, or “standing.” This usage of Amidah as a noun, as opposed to a gerund, is post-Talmudic. The Sages called this liturgy simply תפילה/tefillah, or prayer par excellence. In the pithy phrasing of the Mishnah, they instructed about proper posture: “One only stands to pray in… Read more »
“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing has come… Arise, my love!” Song of Songs, 2:11-12 In these weeks leading to Passover, the verses from Shir haShirim, the Song of Songs, perfectly capture the awakening of nature and human spirit after a… Read more »
On the eve of Purim, let us digress from the prayer book to the Bible’s sex farce, the book of Esther. “A zany laugh-riot,” rave the critics. “A naughty evening of colorful costumes and off-color jokes.” “I laughed, I cried” say shul-goers. “It was better than Katz.” How did this book make it into the… Read more »
א’להי אברהם א’להי יצחק וא’להי יעקב/ Elohei Avraham, Elohei Yitzhak v’Elohei Yaakov/“God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob.” Davening is immeasurably enhanced by knowing the Bible. So much of the Jewish prayer book is built from quotations or allusions the Tanakh. If you know the right passage and detect the reference, the experience of davening the words becomes so much stronger. Imagine you’re an actor playing Hamlet,… Read more »
