Many of you have heard me say it a million times by now. “Now is the time of the silent offering of the amidah, the offering of the heart. You’re invited to offer up whatever prayers you have using the words on the page or the words of your heart.”
I often feel like the Jewish people historically feel less empowered than others do to offer up spontaneous words of prayer, spontaneous words of the heart, which I think are so important for the soul, so important for our connection to the Divine, to put our authentic heart on our sleeve, to bare our soul before our selves and the Divine, so I often try to make a point to really encourage us to do that.
And yet we are in many ways people of the book, drawn to text, drawn to fixed liturgy as a means of building community, common bonds, a common framework so that we can gather together.
So it’s worth, for a moment, taking a look at those words on the page, the words of the Shabbat amidah, in some ways the central prayer of any holiday or prayer service. The talmud refers to the amidah as simply ha’tefilah, the prayer. While the shema is in some ways the central religious affirmation of what it means to be Jewish—listen, Israel, those who wrestle with the divine to the one source of being, and the mitzvot, the calls to action that flow from that—while the shema is a central affirmation, the amidah, is the central prayer, the central offering around which the service is built. Not every service includes the shema; every service includes the amidah.
So what is the shabbat amidah expressing, what is it guiding us towards?
Well to understand that, first we have to make sure we understand the basic structure of the amidah, which is a threefold structure—broken up into three parts—which I’ve heard digested in the past as Wow. Please. Thanks.
In other words, we begin with wow, awe. We offer up three blessings of awe, awe for the arc of the Jewish and human story, God of Abraham and Sarah; awe for divine acts of healing, love, and life giving, however that manifests, awe for divine kedushah, divine holiness, divine otherworldiness. We begin with awe to lay the foundation—to get us in the proper head and heart space for what comes next, which on weekdays—at every service but Shabbat—is, as we said in the threefold structure, “Please.” It is not not-Jewish to ask for stuff; it is human, to have wants, needs, yearnings. Our heart yearns for something. The daily amidah—again, not shabbat; I’ll come back to that in a moment—is built around 13 pleas. P-l-e-a-s, a plea for something, and please-—please, God help me. The traditional pleas include pleas for wisdom, pleas for forgiveness, pleas for redemption, pleas for sustenance, pleas for healing, and more 13, what are sometimes called petitions, yearnings, expressions of need.
Before we close with the third component, thanks. Gratitude. Three expressions of gratitude putting us in touch with the blessings found in each moment of our lives.
It’s a beautiful arc in a simple prayer: laying the foundation through awe, putting us in touch with the magnificent arc of the sacred universe we’re a part of, and the ineffable source of that universe, pouring out hearts with our all to human needs, being personally in touch with the divine in that way, and thank saying thank you, being grateful, for the goodness and the blessings in our lives.
But then there’s that asterisk of Shabbat.
On Shabbat the first and the last sections are exactly the same as the rest of the week—the wow, and the thanks. We’re still in awe, still grateful; or at least aspiring to get in touch with those parts of ourselves.
It’s the please question that switches out. Six days of the week, we’re looking for something; somethings missing, something’s off, we need more of something, we need less of something; we’re looking at all the ways we are deficient, and trying to close the gap.
On Shabbat, we are at rest. We are enough. We are complete, as we are.
And yet, the Shabbat amidah is not content-less, content neautral. There is some messaging at work in our Shabbat amidah, so let’s briefly look at it, based on a teaching from Rabbi Gordon Tucker. There are traditionally three prayer services over the course of a day, Ma’ariv, evening, Shacharit, morning, and Minchah, afternoon.
On each, on Shabbat, the weekday pleas and petitions are replaced by one special prayer on the sanctity of shabbat, each with its own focus.
In ma’ariv, evening, the one we just chanted, it is tachlit ma’aseh shamayim va’aretz — You dedicated the seventh day to Your name as the culmination of the creation of heaven and earth. Shabbat as a reminder of the rest as the culmination of creation.
The next one, tomorrow morning, shacharit, the central blessing of the amidah focuses on u’shnei luchot avanim horid b’yado, vkhatuv ba’hem shemirat shabbat—Moses carried down two tablets of stone from Mount Sinai inscribed with the call to protect shabbat. Here it is Shabbat as a manifestation of revelation; of the moment at Mount Sinai when we received the mitzvot, when we heard the call to act in particular ways to bring holiness into the world.
The third is minchah. The afternoon; as the sun is beginning to set and the shadows are getting longer as we feel shabbat receding but still present. Here we say:
Here the theme is rest. Not just any rest, but a true and lasting rest. We say “Abraham will rejoice, Isaac shall sing, as Jacob and his children
—that’s us—”find rest on this day, a true and trustful rest, a complete rest in which You find delight.”
This, Rabbi Tucker teaches, is the shabbat of the future, and in the arc of the three shabbat prayers, ma’ariv, shacharit, minchah, creation, revelation, and a future redemption, we have shabbat prayer laying out an arc of life.
“On Friday evening,” he writes, “we recall the world’s coming into being, brimming with all of its unrealized potential.
“On Saturday morning, he continues “we relive the revelation at Sinai, which covenanted us to a way of life that prominently includes Shabbat itself and that enables us to fulfill the world’s, and our, potential.” We talk about Shabbat as Mitzvah, sacred call, and how that fulfillment of these calls can bring about a better world.
“And on Saturday afternoon,” he continues, “as the new cycle of the workweek looms more immediately before us, we strengthen ourselves with a renewed vision of a world redeemed, a world that we will actualize through the work we do in the coming week, in accord with our covenantal responsibility. The Friday night moment of creation was “very good,” but Saturday afternoon’s vision is even better- it is of a world redeemed, a world made perfect as the consummation of unity and peace.”
“This is the liturgical journey that we are guided through by the Shabbat services,” he concludes. “We human beings had no hand in creation. But through revelation of Torah, we may acquire a saving role in redemption. That is our weekly curriculum.”
I am a preacher and practitioner of spontaneous prayer; whatever rolls out of the heart and off the tongue. But that’s not to say there is not a lot from the siddur.
