Suddenly I realized that when you truly entered the great stream of spiritual consciousness from which the Jewish people had been addressing God for the past several thousand years, time ceased to flow in only one way. Every point in that stream was connected to every other point and partook of it.

prayer is not meant to be seen as a flat statement of belief. It is a literary creation with all the power, nuance, and complexity of literary creations. As Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky has written: “Prayer had better be poetry, not prose; it had better be mythic poetry at that, correlating the mortal human heart and the eternal divine spirit.”

Reuven Kimelman, professor of classical rabbinic literature at Brandeis, writes about prayer: “[T]he meaning of the liturgy exists not so much in the liturgical text per se as in the interaction between the liturgical text and the biblical intertext. Meaning, in the mind of the reader, takes place between texts rather than within them.”

In prayer, she wrote, it is No longer: I want this or that, but: Life is great and good and fascinating and eternal, and if you dwell so much on yourself and flounder and fluff about, you miss the mighty eternal current that is life.11 It is in these moments—and I am so grateful for them—that all personal ambition drops away from me, and that my th