🕐 3 quick things to enhance your tefillah
Just before Yom Tov, I read a fantastic book, Mean What You Pray by Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt. I was amazed at how easy it was for me to implement what I’d learned, changing my Rosh Hashanah tefillos for the better. I wanted to share this immediately: the next week’s tefillos have high stakes and now’s when we all need these pointers. Here are three quick points to enhance your tefillah.
Go With the Flow
When it comes to high-stakes tefillah, hello pressure! Here’s a mindset shift: Kavanah is not something you actively do, but something that happens to you. It’s a gift from Hashem that can come to a person who is open to it.
So what do you do to have kavanah? You do nothing. You just want it, and “In the way a person wants to go, so he is led.” Once we show desire, the want, and we stop thinking it’s we who are doing the “leading”, we allow ourselves to be led.
- Mean What Your Pray, p59
Imagine diving to the bottom of a pool to get your missing earring. When you get down there, a cloud of sand rises and blocks your vision. You try to fight it, push it all down. Not only will that not help your clarity of vision, it will make it worse. The only thing to do would be to wait until everything settles on its own and try again.
Speed Trap
In the second half of the book, Rabbi Rosenblatt shows how to make each bracha real and how to personalize it. Here’s a little sampling, from the three words we use most often. Use these as a speed trap - get in the habit of a certain thought or visualization every time you say these words, and you’ll never be able to space out for more than one paragraph.
Baruch: Hashem, You are the Source of abundance that you send my way. I feel overwhelmed, unable to absorb the amount of goodness coming to me, which makes me weak-kneed (one reason why we kneel).
Picture a never-ending waterfall heading directly at you.
Atah: My tefillah is intimate. I am not sending up a message hoping it will get to Hashem; I am talking directly to Him, and I have an apt audience.
Picture Hashem’s presence right before you. There is nothing in the entire world besides for you and Hashem.
Hashem: Hashem is the Master of everything. He was, is, and always will be. He is infinite in every aspect, entirely beyond my understanding.
Picture looking at our solar system. Now look beyond that, until you “see” Hashem. As you feel Hashem, everything else fades.
Get into the Details
Why specify what we want when Hashem knows good and well what we’re thinking and what’s right for us?
If Hashem had wanted to figure it all out on His own, he could have created a perfect world with no bechira. Our job is to partner with Hashem and take responsibility for improving our lives and the world. We can often use tefillah as a form of hishtadlus, but that has a caveat - we need to have an opinion about what we want! Having and expressing an opinion while davening is the equivalent of planting the seed in a field: we need to invest effort to be a true partner.
The siddur text is a catch-all, the general form. Personalize it by sticking in the details of your requests in English.
For more, check out Mean What You Pray, by Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt. It’s short, logical and practical and will definitely make a difference to your tefillah. We’ve added it to our suggested learning library, we think this would make great reading both on your own and with a partner.