אדנ’י שפתי תפתח ופי יגיד תהלתך/Adonay sefatai tiftach, u’fi yagid tehilatekha. “My Lord, open my lips and let my mouth declare Your praise.” [Psalm 51.17] The Amidah is preceded by this quotation from Psalms that amounts to a prayer for the power to pray. I will sing God’s praises, sure, but I need God to… Read more »

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 »

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 »