Reflections on the Morning Prayers (Shacharit): Introduction
After a long hiatus brought on by the absolute insanity which is the life of an American Jew by Choice between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, I am happy to be here posting again on JBC.org, and I have to give my props to Avi for the great job on the new format. It looks great!
I thought it might be interesting to do a series of posts on sections of the weekday morning (Shacharit) prayer service. Davening, or ritual prayer, is one of the skills all Jews by Choice have to learn in order to be able to function as competent religious Jews. And even those who have engaged in regular daily davening for years routinely learn new things about the prayers, some of which are older than Rabbinic Judaism itself (unless of course you believe Rabbinic Judaism was practiced by Moshe Rabbeinu as it is by us; if this is you, then you obviously believe that this isn’t the case :)!). Anyway, because my favorite of the three services is the morning one, and the weekday version is, for obvious reasons, done more frequently than the Shabbat version, I thought this would be a good place to start. I welcome your thoughts and comments!
kol tuv,
Yair
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