How do we converse with God?
Prayer builds the relationship between the Creator & His created. When people pray, they are spending time with their God.
To pray is to serve God with your heart, obeying God’s commandment:
Jews, like other people of faith, pray in many different ways.
- They pray so that their hearts can reach out to God
- They pray to express and exercise their beliefs
- They pray to share in the life of a worshipping community
- They pray to obey His commandments
The important things about prayer are:
- You should do it with total concentration. There should be nothing else in your mind
- The prayer should be completely from the heart
Three Times a Day
Jews are supposed to pray three times a day; morning, afternoon, and evening.
The Jewish prayer book (siddur) has special services set down for this.
Praying regularly enables a person to get better at building their relationship with God. After all, most things get better with practice.
Three ways to pray… and there’s more!
There are 3-different sorts of prayer & Jews use all of them.
These are prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of praise & prayers that ask for things.
Jews believe that God will take action in response to prayer, and a teaching from our Rabbi’s tells us that the more we ask God to help us, the more God will love us. (Midrash Tehillim 04:03)
But prayer doesn’t just do the things that the words say it does-thanking, praising, requesting.
- Prayer changes our faith, and it changes us too
- Praying with heart and mind and soul takes a person into a state of being that is different from their everyday awareness
- Prayer enhances a person’s closeness to their God
- Prayer enhances a person’s unity with their fellow Jews
- The formal prayer in the synagogue provides a weekly revision class in the fundamentals of Jewish belief
- Helping Jews to remember what they believe
- Helping Jews find new insights into their relationship with God and with each other.
Public prayer
Much of Jewish prayer consists of reciting the written services aloud in synagogue. This is based on Temple service for the last 3000 years as a formal approach to the Master of the universe
Praying in public affirms that a person is a member of a community, and when they do so, an individual puts themselves into the context of other Jews, and to some extent puts their own particular situation aside to put the community first.
It’s also an act of unity with Jewish people who are doing the same all around the world.
And attending regular services, and following the order of the prayer book, is a valuable spiritual discipline, and a mechanism that enables a person to spend time with God on a regular basis.
The prayer book
The Jewish prayer book (called Siddur) is drawn from the writings of the Jewish people across the ages. It contains the wisdom of great thinkers, and some of the most beautiful Hebrew poetry. Spending time with these prayers enables a person to absorb the spiritual teachings of the great sages before them.
Our King set the foundation for formal prayer back in the wilderness through Moshe Rebbeinu & his brother Aaron. We don’t approach the King any way our hearts desire. There is a formal manner & this method has not changed since the time Israel came out of Egypt. It’s His system & Jews understand this maintaining it to this very day. In fact, the world will once again experience this formal system once the 3rd Temple is rebuilt, be it before or when Mashiach returns.
Kehillat ha’Derech is a return to the original Jewish way that fulfills the multiple prophecies of the return of the “House of Israel” back into the convenent of His Torah through the redemptive work of Mashiach ben Yosef, Yeshua the Nazarene.