Well of Living Insight: Comments on the Siddur

just as we engage in interpretation of Torah, so too can we hold the siddur in the same light.

So step number one in the process of spiritual renewal, according to our tradition, is this kind of subtle inner turning either through prayer or through faith. Step number two is almost precisely the opposite. It involves neither turning nor any kind of movement at all. It involves being still. When we defy the sense of meaninglessness that afflic

if Judaism is going to survive in this country, it will be because it will have succeeded in retrieving this sense of itself as a practice—not as an ethnicity, not as an occasional church—but as a set of intentional and disciplined gestures that have the effect of transforming us, of deepening our relationship to the sacred.

We will be best prepared for the unscripted exclamation if we devote the discipline to regularly scheduled prayer. The resonance of that scripted communal recitation will be that much richer because of the trails blazed by unscripted moments of crying out in anguish, need, or gratitude.