Good Morning Everyone,
Harvey sodaiho Hilbert here writing under a different name in a different blog specifically about contemplative Jewish practice.
I hope you are are well and will feel comfortable commenting.
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Goodness, it is already 7:20 AM! Sometimes I just don't know where the time goes. I was busy cleaning, the robot is going, I was listening to a new "Morning Prayers" CD I received from my friend Stuart at Temple and, well, here it is.
Time is meaningless as we do what we do. Yet, I did not do good practice as my attention was split over listening and doing, thinking, and talking. Sometimes life is like that. Yet, we should practice to notice this and make changes. I did. I settled down and sat at my desk.
Yesterday at the Academy my class on Contemplative Judaism went well. We went over the liturgy and discussed the parts and pieces as aspects of Divine Service, "Avodah". This used to be the practice of Temple sacrifice and just before, during, and after the Second Temple's destruction, we Jews shifted the meaning of avodah to t'filah, prayer.
Now this term, t'filah, is interesting. We translate it into English as "prayer" but that really misses the mark and is quite misleading. Jewish prayer is not a petition per se. The root for prayer is the Latin precari meaning to beg. Whereas, the root of t'filah is judgement or, as Rabbi Slater points out, mindful self-assessment (see Mindful Jewish Living by Jonathon Slater, p. 147).
Rabbi Etshalom in his commentary on the Rambam (Maimonides) also points out that t'filah "reflects back" at ourselves, the ones who are praying. So, our intent in Jewish prayer is to take the words we are using and invite them to become us. It is we who must assess ourselves as to the many blessings we recite and to become them so as to make ourselves "acceptable" to God.
I see this acceptability as a kind of selflessness. During the Morning prayers we should be assessing ourselves and at the same time dropping away ego, allowing us to become selfless as we get to the last word of the Sh'ma, "One".
What an interesting practice.
Shalom