I also received an unexpected email from Chief Rabbi Lord Dr. Soon-to-be-unemployed Jonathan Sacks titled: Three Resolutions for the New Year. I am sharing his third tip as it pertains to the business of this blog, tefilla; if you'd like to read the whole post click here:
Third, pray. Prayer is our dialogue with the infinite Other.
It’s also hard, which is why we have prayer books. The finest collection of
prayers is the book of Psalms. It embraces the spectrum of feeling from despair
to jubilation. Prayer is to the soul what exercise is to the body, and without
it we become emotionally flabby.
Some people don’t pray because they try it and it does not
work. They forget that prayer is done best in the company of others, in a holy
place, in song, the language of the soul as it reaches out toward the
unsayable. The most life-transforming prayers are choral not solo.
Iris Murdoch has a lovely analogy for what prayer can
achieve. She describes looking out of a window in an anxious and resentful
state of mind, oblivious of her surroundings, brooding on some resentment,
feeling sorry for herself. Then, suddenly, she sees a hovering kestrel. “In a
moment,” she says, “everything is altered. The brooding self . . . has
disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of
the other matter it seems less important.” She calls this “unselfing”, and that
is what prayer achieves at its best. It opens our eyes to the wonder of the
world.
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I think it is great advice and honest. Wishing you all a Gregorian Shana Tova
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