THE GENESIS OF A PRAYER: Origins and Meaning of the Amidah - with Rabbi Michael Skobac

According to the sages of the Talmud, the world stands upon three foundations. Torah, divine service of God, which includes the sacrificial services in the Holy Temple, and prayer as well. And then the third foundation is acts of loving kindness. These are the three foundations upon which the world exists. The world stands upon these three, Torah, divine service, prayer, and acts of loving-kindness. Let's try to understand why, of these three, why prayer is so vital. One of the Hebrew words for prayer is tefillah. Tefillah also has the connotation of bonding and connecting. One of the Hasidic masters taught that the Torah is what God gave us. So that we could bond with him. Prayer is what we give to God so that we can bind him to us. If we understand this, the idea that prayer at its core is an experience in bonding with God, a very perplexing passage in the Talmud, Tractate Brachot 7a, becomes clear. The Talmud there asks the following question. How do we know that God prays? Now, on its surface, it almost sounds absurd. What does it mean, God prays? Who does God pray to? And the Talmud actually has a source, has a place where we can see the idea that God prays. And the source the Talmud cites is from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 56, verse 7, where the prophet says, quoting God, I will bring them, God says, to my holy mountain, and I will gladden them in the house of my prayer. That's the verse. And the Talmud observes that the verse doesn't say the house of their prayer, that's who normally prays, the people. Talmud says that God is saying in the house of my prayer, implying that God prays. Therefore, the Talmud concludes this is the source. This is where we see from the Bible that God prays. Now, of course, it's difficult to understand this in the normal sense of the word prayer. But when we understand prayer as bonding and connecting, then we can grasp what is meant by God praying. We connect in relationship with God. And he connects in relationship with us. We communicate with him, and he communicates with us. Relationships go both ways. And so when we speak about prayer, when we pray, it's the act of connecting with God and bonding. The Talmud is basically saying that when God prays, it's reciprocating this relationship, that God is well. is seeking to connect with us and to bond with us. Now, because the goal that God had in creating human beings was to develop relationships with us and to ultimately be closely connected with us, prayer helps us to achieve the very purpose of our existence. And then we can understand now why the Talmud says, That prayer is one of the three foundations upon which the world stands, because prayer is essential in helping human beings achieve the entire goal and purpose of our being here in this world. In fact, prayer is actually our essence as human beings. Prayer is who we are. We see this illustrated in a passage from the Talmud. In Tractate Bava Kamma 2a, and the Talmud there discusses various agents that cause damage in the world, and it lists four, four principal damagers in the world. The first is called Shor, which means ox, and it includes damages. that are caused by animals. Animals cause damage in many ways and this is the category called shore and then there's bore which means pit and this includes damages caused by open pits or obstacles in the public domain. The third category is called hever which means fire and it is basically dealing The fourth category of Damager is called Mave. And this word is very mysterious. It's not really clear what it means. And it's the subject of a dispute in the Talmud. According to the sage named Rav, mave refers to damage that is caused by a human being. The human being is the fourth category of damager. Now, why is the human being referred to as mave of all things? So, Mave is derived from the root Ba'a. And Ba'a can have the implication of to pray, to seek, to pray. And so we see that according to this view, man is defined, this is the term that's used for a human being, man here is defined as the creature that prays, as the being that prays. And this is who we are. And it's the most significant thing about us. And that's why the Talmud here refers to the human being as a prayer. Tefillah has the meaning of connecting and binding. We saw that Tefillah is the most common word used for prayer. And the reason we were created was to bond with our creator. And so again, if that's the whole purpose that we exist, The Talmud describes the human being as a being that prays, because that's the reason that we're here in the first place, to pray in order to connect with God, and that's what prayer does. Prayer connects us with God. And we also see this idea of prayer being the essence of who we are from the creation story itself. In Genesis chapter 2, verse 7, we read that God formed man Out of the dust of the ground. And then he blew into his nostrils the breath of life. And man became, as the Bible says there, a living being. That God blew into our nostrils the breath of life, and we became a living being. The Aramaic translation of the Torah called the Targum Onkelus, which is the most... Really, authentic and authoritative translation of the Torah renders the phrase living being as ruach mimalala. What does it mean to be a living being? So the Targum Onkelus renders it as ruach mimalala, which means a speaking spirit. That the essence of the human being is not their opposable thumb. The essence of the human being is their power of speech. It's our capacity to speak that distinguishes us as human beings. Now, this can include, obviously, all kinds of speech. It could include ordering pizza at a pizza shop. That's something that only human beings can do. But there's a particular kind of speech that gets to the heart of what a human being is really meant to be. Ordering pizza is not the ultimate expression of what a human being can be. There's a particular kind of speech that we're really looking at when the Targum Onkelus says that's what's unique about us, is the fact that we're a speaking spirit. So in Genesis chapter 24, verse 63, the Torah tells us that Isaac went out, la starting This is sometimes translated as to meditate in the field. Isaac went out to meditate in the field. But literally, the phrase means to speak in the field, to to speak in the field. speak And our tradition understands what was he speaking about? Why did he go out into the field to speak? now. And so our tradition tells us that his speaking was really supplicating, was praying. He was communicating with God, and this is the highest function of speech, and it expresses the deepest level of who we are, and King David expressed this in Psalm 109, verse 4, when King David said, And I am prayer, that David essentially identified himself. Who am I? I am one who prays. So we saw, number one, that prayer is vital because prayer is the way that we connect with God. And secondly, prayer is vital because prayer really is the deepest expression of who we are. That's what the human being is at his core. Now, we saw from the creation story that our bodies are physical and come from the earth. And the Hebrew word for earth is Adama. And the word for human is adam, meaning the human adam comes from the adamah, comes from the earth. But the essence of who we are and what makes us unique is not our physical body. The essence of who we are and what makes us unique is our spiritual soul that God breathed into us. One of the Hebrew words for soul is nephesh. And this word nephesh Often reflects in the Bible a person's innermost desires and deepest convictions. What matters most to us, that's our soul. Our prayers flow from the depths of our soul and reflect our deepest desires and who we really are. Rabbi Jonathan Sachs expressed it this way. He said, prayer is the language of the soul. in conversation with God. Prayer is the language of the soul in conversation with God. And prayer isn't just something that our souls do. Prayer is actually a need, a need of the soul. Rabbi Yehuda Levi, writing in his magnum opus called the Kuzari, almost a thousand years ago, Explains that prayer nourishes our souls just as food nourishes our bodies. And just as our bodies cannot go without food, our souls really cannot go without prayer. The more our souls become atrophied through the negative influences of a superficial and materialistic world, it's the result of the longer those souls go without prayer. Prayer is what keeps our souls healthy. On the other hand, Rabbi Yehuda Levy says that the most fruitful part of our day is the time we spend engaged in prayer. It's the most fruitful and productive and important part of our day. That's when our soul accomplishes and does the most important things that it could do. We've seen that one aspect of prayer is that through it, We bond with God and strengthen our connection with him. How does prayer cultivate this closeness with God? How does it work? So the lifeblood of all relationships is communication. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the famous mystic and rabbinic sage in the 18th century, writes in his classic work, Mesillat Yesharim, The Pathways of the Upright, in chapter 19, He writes that when praying, you are literally standing before the Creator, may his name be blessed, and conducting a conversation with him. You implore him and make requests of him, and the Blessed One listens to you and is attentive to your words, just like one person speaks to their friend and the other listens attentively to him. Prayer is communication, the lifeblood of a relationship. That's one of the ways in which prayer brings us closer to God. Secondly, according to the Maharal of Prague, another aspect of prayer that fosters intimacy with God is that by requesting from God what we need in life, we come to appreciate how dependent we are on Him. Realizing how much we need God is similar to a child who understands that they can't survive without their parents. One of the reasons that the relationship between parents and children is so strong is because the children depend on their parents. They have to come to their parents for what they need, and this is reinforced over years and years and years. When we do this same thing. By approaching God with our needs and making requests of him, this requesting and asking and seeking, this gets us in touch with the reality that our lives are in his hands and that we need him. This recognition of dependence is a way to bond and merely the recognition of dependence by coming to God with our requests, that recognition itself is really more important than whether or not we will receive what we're asking for. The real goal of prayer is to come and make the request in order that we should understand that we depend on God, because the bonding is the ultimate purpose of praying. The ultimate, even though, of course, we would like to receive what we're asking for, but that's not the ultimate goal of the prayer. The ultimate goal of the prayer is to come close to God. And that closeness is developed and fostered by coming to recognize how much we need God and depend on him. A related aspect. of this is that expressing gratitude and thanks in prayer also strengthens our connection to the Almighty. It makes our relationship real when we're able to recognize and then acknowledge the role that God plays in our lives. When we think about how many blessings we receive from God and how much thanks we owe Him, that itself builds tremendous closeness to God. Now, aside from understanding prayer as an exercise in bonding and solidifying our relationship with God, there are other angles for how to look at prayer. The root of the Hebrew word tefillah, which again is the most common word for prayer, one of the roots is palel, palel. And palel means judgment. And when we use it in a verb form, the verb to pray in Hebrew is lehit palel, lehit palel, which is the reflexive form and means to engage in self-judgment. That lehit palel, to pray, is an act of engaging in self-judgment and self-introspection and analysis. The idea here is that prayer is not meant to change God. We cannot change God. That's not possible. Prayer is meant to change ourselves, to make ourselves into fitting vessels to receive God's blessing. We have to honestly reflect on what we're requesting from God. We come to God with a lot of requests. Do I need what I'm asking for? Is it a frivolous request? Do I really deserve it? I'm asking for another year of life. Do I deserve it? What do I intend to do with what I'm requesting? I'm asking for a new house. I'm asking for a lot of money. I'm asking for health. But what do we intend to do with these gifts that we hope to receive? How have I used God's gifts in the past? These are all difficult questions. But these are the kind of questions that we confront when we engage in this act of self-judgment. Because once again, the words I'm saying in prayer might be a request for livelihood, a request for health. But what can be going through our minds as we're saying those words is, boy, I'm asking for this. Do I need it? Do I deserve it? What am I going to do with it? These are all spinoffs of what happens when we pray. Through prayer, we clarify who we really are. Because again, we mentioned before that who we really are are our deepest held desires, what we really want in life. That's our soul. And we begin the process through coming to understand who we really are. We begin the process of improvement and purification. That can only take place after honest self-assessment and stock-taking. So that's a secondary purpose of prayer. Number one, we saw was bonding and connecting with God. Number two, it's really connecting with ourselves. Who are we now that I'm speaking to God? Because to have a relationship, you have to understand who you are, not just who you're seeking to connect with. Now, in the Torah, we find another cognate word. to tefillah, which is very revealing. We saw that one cognate of tefillah is the word that means to bond. Another cognate is the word for judgment. But there's a third that I wanted to look at. And we see this in the story of Joseph and his brothers. When Joseph's brothers His mother sold him as a slave. They took his special garment. That he would wear and they dipped it in animal blood and they showed it to Jacob, their father, telling him that a wild animal had eaten Joseph. Joseph was the favorite son of Jacob. And Jacob grieved for his beloved son, Joseph, for 22 years. It's horrible for him. But Joseph, we know, was not dead. He was taken to Egypt. Where he incredibly rose in power to be the viceroy of Egypt, second only to the pharaoh. Finally, Jacob comes down to Egypt and has a tearful reunion with his son Joseph. Years later, towards the end of his life, we're told that Jacob became ill. And Joseph, with his two sons, went to visit Jacob. When Jacob saw his two grandsons for the first time, he got all choked up. And he said to Joseph in the book of Genesis, chapter 48, verse 11, he said, I dared not accept the thought that I would ever see your face. And here, God has shown me even your offspring. The Hebrew word in this verse for accept the thought is pilalti, pilalti. You can hear how it's related to the word tefillah. In the verse, Jacob says that he couldn't accept the thought that he would ever see Joseph, couldn't accept the thought to think about the fact that maybe he's going to be reunited with his son all those 22 years. He couldn't imagine that he would ever see Joseph again because he didn't want to face an incredible disappointment, a terrible disappointment. So he's saying now, I just couldn't let the thought enter my mind. That I would ever see your face again. It would have been too difficult a thought to allow it to kick around in my head. Because it would just lead to a crushing disappointment. That's how I felt. The way Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch translates this phrase, Jacob was saying, I did not allow the thought to enter my mind. I didn't allow the thought to enter my mind that I would ever see your face again. So, based on this understanding of the word pilalti, Rabbi Hirsch understands prayer as allowing godly thoughts to infuse our minds. In prayer, we seek to have God and thoughts about God suffuse our consciousness. Now, you can see very obviously how this is related to the whole theme of getting close to God. This is basically trying to allow our thought process and what we think about to be directed more towards God. And we find this desire to have our consciousness filled with thoughts about God, we find it in the biblical reading called the Shema Yisrael from Deuteronomy chapter 6. And in the third verse of this reading called Shema Yisrael, In chapter 6, verse 6, the Torah says, And these words that I command you today shall be upon your heart. And the Kotzker Rebbe famously pointed out that it doesn't say here, these words that I command you today shall be in your heart. You would think that's where you would want them. You want God's words in your heart. Why does the Torah say they shall be upon your heart? The reason, the Kutzker says, is because we simply cannot just inject God's words into our hearts. It's not that simple. You can't snap your fingers and gain that kind of very profound internal God consciousness. But we can always place God's words upon our hearts, on the surface. That you can do. And then in life... Our hearts often break, or they open up, and we can work towards a time when these words will penetrate our hearts, and the words will become internalized. This is the goal of our prayers. The goal of our prayers is that the words of our prayers will seep into our hearts and become internalized. Their messages and their meanings should become integrated into our deepest parts of who we are, not just to believe that there is a God, but to know that there is a God and to feel his presence in our life. To say that you believe in God, if someone happens to ask you, do you believe in God? And you would respond, yes, I believe in God. That's not the same as a person that walks with God because they know that God is real and they feel his presence in their life. That's the difference between believing and knowing. That's the difference between having a superficial assent to an idea and having a deeply internalized connection with the idea. Prayer becomes, therefore, a practice where you are implanting God-consciousness deeply into your heart. That's how Rabbi Hirsch understands the idea of prayer based upon this word pilalti that Jacob said, I could never have allowed the thought that I would see your face again enter my heart. And that's what we do in prayer. We allow, we want certain thoughts to enter our hearts. As we see in Deuteronomy chapter 4, verse 39, where it says, you shall know this day And then, take it into your heart, that the Lord, He is the God. In the heaven and on earth below, there is none other. The verse says, you shall know this day, meaning know it in your head intellectually. But that's not enough. The Torah goes on to say, and what you know in your mind intellectually, bring it into your heart. Begin to try to feel those things that you know. And indeed, prayer is defined. As the service of God with our heart. The Bible's source for the obligation of prayer is from the verse in Deuteronomy chapter 11, verse 13, which says we are to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all of your heart and all of your soul. And the question is, how do we serve God with our heart? How exactly is that done? And the Talmud in Tractate Ta'anit 2a explains this verse is referring to prayer. What is the service of the heart? It's prayer. Now, according to Maimonides, there are three basic components to what prayer is supposed to be. Number one, in prayer, we praise God by focusing on who he is and his attributes. Number two, we request from God. That which we need personally and that which others need. And number three, we recognize that God is the source of everything that we have. And we recognize this and we thank him for all of our blessings. Those are the three components of what we do when we pray. Now, originally, prayer was informal. It was spontaneous and it was non-liturgical. In times of the Bible, people didn't have prayer books. When we quoted the verse before from Genesis chapter 24 about Isaac going out into the field and speaking and meditating, he wasn't praying out of a prayer book. He was pouring out his heart to God using his own language. But over time, certain practices began to develop. For example... Rabbi Yossi ben Hanina in the Talmudic Tractate Brachot 26 says that each of the patriarchs established a special time for prayer. So Abraham established prayer in the morning. Isaac instituted prayer in the afternoon. That's when he went out to meditate in the field. And Jacob ordained evening prayers. And this goes back a very long time. And in that same passage from the Talmud, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says that these three daily prayers, these three times for prayer, were instituted to correspond to the daily sacrifices that were brought in the Holy Temple. There was a daily perpetual offering each morning and every afternoon. And these correspond to the morning and afternoon prayer times. The evening prayer service corresponds to the overnight burning of the fats and the organs of the daily sacrifices that were not consumed on the altar entirely during the day. We see in the Bible that praying three times a day was actually an old tradition among pious Jews. It wasn't institutionalized as a formal requirement. But we see pious Jews that prayed three times a day. Where do we see this? So, for example, in the book of Daniel, chapter 6, verse 11, we read that Daniel, in his home, would face Jerusalem, and it says he prayed three times each day. This was a practice that was known. And we also see this practice mentioned by King David. Earlier in Jewish history, King David lived much before Daniel. And he writes in Psalm 55, verse 18, Evening, morning, and noon, I pray and pour out my heart. However, until the time of the second temple, there were no formal fixed prayers and no officially mandated times for prayer. People prayed spontaneously whenever they were moved to do so, or when personal circumstances demanded it. The development of a more formalized and structured prayer ritual stemmed from a national crisis that grew out of the destruction of the first holy temple in Jerusalem. We know that most of the nation went into exile to Babylon, and after 70 years, some of the Jews returned, and there were two great leaders that were leading the Jewish community in the land of Israel after the return from the Babylonian exile. These were Ezra the scribe, Ezra and Nehemiah, and they really worked very hard to reorganize Jewish life in Israel because they faced a number of very serious challenges back then. First of all, during the Babylonian exile, the people began speaking a number of different foreign languages, including Greek, Persian, and Aramaic, and they were beginning to lose their identity. And they were no longer able to express themselves in Hebrew. Maimonides actually wrote that half of their children, half of their children only spoke foreign languages and couldn't speak any more in Hebrew. Another critical problem, which is related to the problem of language, was the high degree of assimilation and intermarriage that affected the Jews who remained in Israel, who never went into the Babylonian exile. Yet they were mixing with the non-Jews who were also hanging out in the land of Israel. And these problems could not go unchecked. So Ezra and Nehemiah launched a comprehensive program of national spiritual revival. And one of these initiatives, which was meant again to address these two problems, led to the growth of the institution of synagogues. To preserve and enhance Jewish identity and Jewish spirituality. The National Religious Court at the time of Ezra was known as the Anshe Knesset Hagidola, the men of the Great Assembly. Now, this august body was comprised of 120 outstanding Torah scholars, as well as many great prophets, including Haggai, and Zechariah, and Malachi, and Daniel, and Hananiah, and Mishael, and Azariah, and Nehemiah, and Mordechai, and Jubal. Great, great prophets. So this group, the Anshe Knesset Hagidola, the men of the Great Assembly, fixed the number of three daily prayer services. What before had been the practice of some pious Jews, this now became formalized and established as a rule, as a requirement, that now we pray three times a day. And they composed the general outline of the basic prayers and established the times for reciting them. This is really an amazing accomplishment of the men of the Great Assembly. It's important to remember that the prayers that they composed were not just human inventions in a sense. When you have prophets that are engaged in composing prayers... These are very, very, very elevated and holy prayers. Now, in traditional Jewish parlance, meaning the way we normally speak, there are two ways that the word tefillah, or prayer, is used. When we use the word prayer, it can be used in one of two ways. Similar to the word Torah, for example. Torah can really mean any kind of Jewish thinking. Can include. The sermon that a rabbi gives in a synagogue on Shabbat morning, he's speaking words of Torah. But Torah also has a more limited usage. Torah is the five books of Moses. So you have sort of a more narrow understanding of what Torah is. And then you have the more broad global understanding. The same thing applies to the word tefillah or prayer. Sometimes prayer is used generically. And generically. For any kind of supplication, praise of God, blessing, spiritual poetry, or biblical text that we recite during the three services that we have each day. And these texts, all kinds of texts, appear in our, we call it a prayer book. The prayer book is called a siddur. Siddur is related to the word seder, which means order, because The prayer book arranges all of the various readings and prayers into a specific order. For example, what are the kinds of things we find in the prayer book? So there's an entire section called the Pesukei d'Zimra, the verses of song. And these are basically, primarily, selections from the Book of Psalms. Now, the Book of Psalms is part of the Bible. It's true. That many of the Psalms were prayers that were said by King David, but it's part of the Bible, meaning that we understand that as part of the Bible, these are inspired prayers, right? David wrote with what we call Ruach HaKodesh, with the spirit of holiness. Not quite prophecy, but again, he's receiving these prayers, if you will, from God. Also in the prayer book, we find Find the famous. passage called Shema Yisrael, which are three paragraphs from the Torah, from the five books of Moses. Now, the five books of Moses is, again, God speaking to us. It's not prayer in the sense that we think of we are speaking to God. So, when we look at the prayer book proper, many of the Texts that we find in the prayer book are not really prayers. But technically... The word tefillah, or prayer, has a much narrower connotation. So again, we use it generically, globally, to refer to any kind of writing or text or reading that we find in our siddur, our prayer book. But there's a narrower technical definition, and prayer here refers to a particular set of blessings. that are commonly referred to as the Shmona Esrei. Shmona Esrei means 18. So we have a series of blessings that are called 18 because in its original formulation, it had 18 blessings. Another name for this set of blessings is called the Amidah. Amidah means standing because this prayer It has to be recited while standing, as we'll soon discuss. So when we use the word tefillah, prayer, for example, whenever the Talmud speaks about a person praying, it's referring to this special series of blessings that we call either the Shmona Esrei, the 18, or the Amidah, the standing prayer, and this is the narrower sense of the word tefillah. This prayer, again, the Shmona Esrei, the 18 blessings, or the Amidah, the standing prayers, it's often called. This is prayer par excellence. It is the central, most essential part of every prayer service. So if you open up a prayer book and you look at the morning prayers, there are lots of things that we will recite in the morning prayers. But it's the Shmona Esrei, the Amidah, which is the prayer. This is it. And everything else is preparatory, is to enhance, is supplementary. But it's all organized around this prayer that we call either the Amidah or the Shemona Esrei. The basic formula. The Shemona Esrei of the Amidah was formulated by the 120 men of the Great Assembly in the 5th century before the Common Era. It was composed in Hebrew. As we said before, part of the agenda was to help connect people back to Hebrew, back to the traditional language. And the Shemona Esrei contains all of the essential components of prayer. It includes praise of God. It includes placing our requests before him, and it includes thanking him. Now, shortly after the destruction of the second temple, in the year 70 of the Common Era, hundreds of years later, the form and order of these 18 blessings was crystallized and finalized by someone named Shimon HaPakouli, who did it at the direction of Rabbi Gamliel, Who was the leader of the Jewish community at that time in the first century. Now later, as we're going to see, a 19th blessing was added to this prayer. So a 19th blessing was added to the 18 blessings. But the name had been used for so long that the name basically stuck. And it was never changed. So even though today... Our prayer has 19 blessings. We still refer to it as the Shemona Esrei, the 18. And the basic structure of the Shemona Esrei or the Amidah consists of three blessings of praise. We begin by praising God, by trying to understand who we're talking to when we pray. So there are three blessings that are called the blessings of praise. And then there are 13 blessings where we make our requests of God, and it's followed by three blessings of thanksgiving, of thanks. So again, it's a structure of three blessings of praise, 13 blessings of request, and three blessings of thanks. However, on the Sabbath and on holidays, there were only seven blessings in total, not 19. And the reason is because on these days, we feel totally fulfilled, and we don't feel we need anything. We don't feel we need to make requests of God on these holy days. So on the holidays, on the festivals, and on Shabbat, there will still be three blessings of praise and three blessings of thanks in the end. But instead of the 13 middle blessings where we ask God for the things that we need, We have one blessing where we describe the special holiness of the day. So again, you'll notice if you see a Shabbat or holiday prayer book, the Amidah doesn't have 19 blessings. It has seven blessings. Once again, the Shemona Esrei, the Amidah, is the heart of every prayer service. Everything else is said essentially as a preparation or a lead-up. to the Shemona Esrei, or it's supplementary to it. Much of these other sections of the prayer services are again selections from the Psalms or from the Torah, where again in the Psalms and the Torah, we're basically reading God's message to us, what God has spoken to us in his Bible. But in the Shemona Esrei, we stand before God and we address him. We speak to him. And we are supposed to feel that we're actually standing in the presence of God and expressing our deepest needs to Him. That's one of the requirements when we pray, is to somehow imagine that I am standing in the presence of God. Most of us cannot get an appointment with the president or prime minister of the country we live in. It might take you months or years, and you probably will never get to personally meet. the president or prime minister of your country. But we are able to, when we pray, have a personal, direct meeting with the creator of all existence. That's what happens when we pray. The Shemona Esrei is said facing the direction of the land of Israel. People that are worshiping in Israel turn to face Jerusalem, and those located in Jerusalem pray towards the Temple Mount. The Talmud teaches that if you don't know which direction to face, you should simply direct your heart to your Father in heaven. As we mentioned earlier, this prayer is also called the Amidah, because it is said standing, and the custom is to stand with our feet together at attention, because standing at attention is a posture of respect. We're not slouching, we're not... Looking like we're incredibly relaxed and comfortable. We should be comfortable in front of God. But we want our body posture to reflect a seriousness and a respect. And so when people in the army stand in front of their superior officer, they stand at attention. And so the practice is to stand with our feet together when we're praying. In addition to this posture being a posture of respect. It's also identified as being similar to angels. The prophet Ezekiel, in his book, chapter 1, verse 7, describes the angels as having one straight foot. That's how angels are described. So when we are speaking to God, we assume the posture of the ministering angels. In addition, it's a posture reflecting immobility. When you have your feet together. It can't move so easily, and it reflects our conviction that we are totally powerless without God, that by ourselves, we don't have any real power in the world. Another important source for how we pray the Shemona Esrei, this central prayer of ours, comes from the biblical character named Hannah, Hannah who was the mother of the prophet Samuel. And we know that she went for many years without having a child. And in the first book of Samuel chapter 1, it describes how she went to the tabernacle in Shiloh to pray for a son. We're told that she poured out her heart and crying bitter tears. And as she was praying, the high priest Eli observed her mouth. And he saw that she was speaking from her heart, but only her lips moved and her voice was not heard. So the rabbinic sages saw that her deep and heartfelt prayer was actually an ideal manifestation of someone praying. If you were to look at Hannah coming before God and praying from the depths of her soul for what she really wanted in life, the rabbi said, that's someone who's praying properly. And therefore, they adopted her manner of prayer when we pray. When we pray, we pray the Shemona Esrei quietly to ourselves in a whisper that other people don't hear, although it should be audible to ourselves, and it's for this reason that the Amidah and the Shemona Esrei is often referred to as The silent prayer, or the silent meditation. So that's a third name for this, actually a fourth. So we see that this prayer is called the prayer, the tefillah. This is it, this is the tefillah, this is the prayer. It's also called the Shemona Esrei, because it has originally 18 blessings. It's also called the Amidah, because we say it standing. And it's also called tefillah belachash, the silent prayer. Another aspect of this is that by praying quietly, we ensure that we won't disturb anyone else that might be praying nearby. Now, we find a number of places in the Bible where people approach God before prayer. They don't just stop what they're doing and begin praying. There's a formality in the same way when people would approach a king. You don't just come running up to the king's seat. There's a formal approach that shows respect and honor to the king. And so there are places where we see people approaching God in prayer. For example, in Genesis 18, verse 23, Abraham approaches God. We're told that Abraham approached before pleading with God to spare the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. And in 1 Kings 18, verse 36, the prophet Elijah approached God at Mount Carmel to plead for him, to plead for God to send down a fire to consume his sacrifices in his showdown with the prophets of Baal. Similarly, before beginning the Shemona Esrei, we take three small steps. Toward God, forward to approach God, our King. And at the conclusion of the Shemona Esrei, when we finished, we don't just scuttle off. We take three steps backward, respectfully taking leave of God.