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Prayer in Judaism

How to Pray

Prayer builds the relationship between God and human beings.

When people pray, they spend time with God. To pray is to serve God with your heart, obeying God's commandment:

Jews, like other people of faith, pray in many different ways.

• They pray so that their hearts can reach out to God
• They pray to express and exercise their beliefs
• They pray to share in the life of a worshipping community
• They pray to obey God's commandments

The important things about prayer are:

• You should do it with total concentration on God-there should be nothing else in your mind
• The prayer should be completely from the heart

Three Times a Day

Jews are supposed to pray three times a day; morning, afternoon, and evening.

The Jewish prayer book (it's called a siddur) has special services set down for this.

Praying regularly enables a person to get better at building their relationship with God. After all, most things get better with practice.

Three ways to pray... and there's more!

There are three different sorts of prayer, and Jewish people use all of them.

These are prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of praise, and prayers that ask for things.

Jews believe that God will take action in response to prayer, and a teaching from the rabbis tells us that the more we ask God to help us, the more God will love us. (Midrash Tehillim 4:3)

But prayer doesn't just do the things that the words say it does-thanking, praising, requesting.

• Prayer changes our faith, and it changes us too
• Praying with heart and mind and soul takes a person into a state of being that is different from their everyday awareness
• Prayer enhances a person's closeness to God
• Prayer enhances a person's closeness to their fellow Jews
• The formal prayer in the synagogue provides a weekly (if not daily) revision class in the fundamentals of Jewish belief
  • Helping Jews to remember what they believe
  • Helping Jews find new insights into their relationship with God and with each other.

Public prayer and blessings

Public prayer

Much of Jewish prayer consists of reciting the written services aloud in synagogue.

Praying in public affirms that a person is a member of a community, and when they do so, an individual puts themselves into the context of other Jews, and to some extent puts their own particular situation aside to put the community first.

It's also an act of togetherness with Jewish people who are doing the same all around the world.

And attending regular services, and following the order of the prayer book, is a valuable spiritual discipline, and a mechanism that enables a person to spend time with God on a regular basis.

The prayer book

The Jewish prayer book is drawn from the writings of the Jewish people across the ages. It contains the wisdom of great thinkers, and some of the most beautiful Hebrew poetry.

Spending time with these prayers enables a Jewish person to absorb the spiritual teachings of the Jewish people.

For example, this extract from the Morning Service is a profound lesson in the nature of God, as well as an act of worship.

Blessings

Observant Jews will say a blessing over everything they eat or drink, and in the face of many natural events. Doing so acknowledges that God is involved in everything.

So before drinking wine a Jew would say (in Hebrew):

Or on seeing trees blossoming for the first time in the year:

Credits: Prayers and blessings taken from the Centenary edition of the Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. © Singer's Prayer Book Publication Committee, 1990