Prayer: Service Of The Heart
Abraham's servant teaches us the power of spontaneous prayer, a concept that challenges our contemporary focus on consistency and conformity.
By Rabbi Bradley Artson on MyJewishLearning.com
One of the universals of human culture is the need to commune with something larger, something that extends beyond ourselves.
We all feel the desire to speak, to create, to perform. One aspect of the human urge to communicate is worship--the simple act of noticing the awe of existence, the staggering marvel of the world and its order. Awe moves us to a silent expression of gratitude and wonder. Awe moves us to worship.
What is Worship?
For many Jews, worship means the formal ritual of reading from a printed Siddur (prayer book), listening to the chanted words of the Torah and the Haftarah (weekly reading from Prophets or Writings), and absorbing the insights of the rabbi's sermon. Worship is public, planned, and cyclical. What we did last week we will do again next week.
Today's Torah portion illumines another aspect of Jewish worship, one sadly neglected by too many Jews today. While most of us are familiar with reading the stirring words of prayer composed by other, earlier Jews, few of us are comfortable approaching God with the simple outpouring of our own hearts. The whole notion of just speaking with God sounds strikingly un-Jewish.
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