Loving prayer

"This book is intended as a study guide to the morning service in the Jewish prayer book, to help those who struggle with the prayers. Perhaps you would like prayer to be your spiritual practice but you can't find your way. Perhaps you lose interest too easily and would like a framework that sustains your involvement. Perhaps you are already familiar with the prayers, but they have become rote for you, and you are looking for new insights. We begin with the consciousness that Jewish prayer is a liturgy, best thought of as a cousin to drama, dance, or symphony. It is not someone's spontaneous prayer written down for others to imitate. Liturgy is composed, crafted, arranged for a purpose. I like the analogy of drama because I can think of the segments of liturgy as scenes. The comparison also invites me to identify with characters or actions as well as to contemplate ideas and themes. A certain kind of consciousness will develop as you take on this approach to practice: an imaginative interaction with the words of the siddur. Unlike a play that you watch from the audience, much of the liturgical drama goes on in your imagination. Actually, we are using our imaginations with a stage play as well - we "identify" with the characters and our bodies respond with pleasure or sadness or thrill to the action in empathic imagination. With Jewish prayer, we need to extract the drama from the words before us and carry it along in our minds"--