PREPARING TO PRAY A person should pray with such devotion that his heart is as if it were poured out like water before the Lord. God listens to every word of prayer. No word goes to waste, and the effect of prayer accumulates until God’s mercies are brought down. It is written, “Water wears away stone” (Job 14:19). It may seem that water dripping on a stone cannot make any impression. Nevertheless, after many years it can actually make a hole in the stone. Even if your heart feels like stone and it seems that your prayer makes no impression on it, still, as the days and years pass, it too will be penetrated. (Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav) Once, one of the followers of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav asked him the difference between depression and a broken heart. He replied: “When you have a broken heart, you can be standing in the middle of a crowd and still turn around and say, ‘Master of the Universe.’” The Maggid of Mezeritch said: “Every lock has a key which opens it. But there are strong thieves who know how to open it without a key. They break the lock. So, every spiritual mystery can be opened by the appropriate meditation. But God loves the thief who breaks the lock open: I mean the person who prays with a broken heart.” Before beginning to pray, Rabbi Yeḥiel Mikhal of Zlotchov was in the habit of saying, “I join myself to all of Israel, to those who are more than I, that through them my prayer may rise – and to those who are less than I, that they may rise through my prayer.” The Siddur and Maḥzor are the books of Jewish faith, and prayer is its language. In Judaism we do not primarily philosophize about faith; we pray it. We do not talk about God; we speak to Him. Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel of Kotzk once asked his disciples, “Where does God live?” Confounded, they asked him, “What does the Rabbi mean: Where does God live? Where does God not live?” But the Rabbi replied, “God lives where we let Him in.” Prayer is where we open ourselves to God. It is where we let God in. The Amida, the “Standing” prayer, is the core of prayer as such, and when saying it we must see ourselves as if we stood directly in God’s presence. For this reason we take three steps forward and bow, using body language to convey the motion of the mind. The first and last three blessings of the Amida are essentially the same throughout the year, though specific additions are made at special times. The first three are collectively about Praise of God, the last three about Thanksgiving.

אַתָּה גִּבּוֹר לְעוֹלָם You are eternally mighty. A paragraph that five times refers to the resurrection of the dead, that is, that those who died will one day live again. This was a major controversy in the late Second Temple era, between the Pharisees, who believed in the resurrection, and the Sadducees who did not. Shortly after the destruction of the Temple, the Sadducees ceased to be a force in Jewish life. The idea of resurrection is essential to the Jewish belief in justice: that those who died before their time, whether through illness, oppression or violence, will, at the end of days, have life restored to them in a way we cannot yet understand.

אַתָּה קָדוֹשׁ You are holy. The word “holy” in Judaism means “standing apart, outside, beyond.” God is holy because He is transcendent, that is, He exists outside and beyond the universe. We become holy when we become subjects, not objects; when we demonstrate our freedom and distinctiveness, thereby showing that not everything in the human realm is the result of inexorable causation, be it economic (Marx), psychological (Freud), or genetic (neo-Darwinism).

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יהוה, מֶֽלֶךְ עַל כָּל הָאָֽרֶץ Blessed are You, Lord, King over all the earth. Note that the concluding blessing of the Malkhiyot section combines both the concept of Kingship (“King over all the earth”) and the special sanctity of the day (“Who sanctifies Israel and the Day of Remembrance”). It is rare for a single blessing to combine two themes.

אַתָּה נִגְלֵֽיתָ You were revealed. A rich tapestry of references to the shofar throughout history: at the revelation at Mount Sinai, in the Temple as God’s sovereignty was proclaimed, and in the future, with the ingathering of exiles.