Before beginning the T'filah, the central prayer of the service, we recite this simple verse from Psalm 51: "Adonai, open up my lips that my mouth may declare Your praise." Before we begin praying, we ask God to use us as an instrument to speak the words that we need to say.
Have you ever had the experience of singing with other people and feeling like you got lost in the sound of all the voices around you? Have you ever been engaged in a sport so deeply that you felt like your body was moving without your mind telling it what to do? There is a joy in giving yourself to an activity so deeply that it requires no effort and everything flows from a place beyond your conscious thinking.
That is one way of describing the experience of praying deeply. At some point, the prayer flows out of you effortlessly and all you need to do is let it out of your mouth. The verse from Psalm 51 that we recite before the T'filah helps us to set our intention for our prayer. We want to pray spontaneously and joyfully. We want to feel like we are placing ourselves into God's hands so that, instead of us speaking the prayer, it feels like the the prayer is speaking us.
The opening blessing of the T'filah is called Avot v'Imahot, which literally means "Fathers and Mothers." The blessing connects us with the patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – and the matriarchs – Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. We remember that we are part of the covenant with God that started with these ancestors.
In the words of the blessing, God is identified separately for each ancestor. We say, "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob…," rather than just saying, "The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…" A rabbinic teaching says that this is because God is understood differently by each of us and God connects differently to each person. By saying, "The God of…," for each ancestor, we remember that there is no one correct way to think about God.
The second blessing of the T'filah is called the G'vurot, which means "Strength." The blessing acknowledges that God has power over our lives, focussing on two areas where we most immediately think of God's power: the weather and death.
In the contemporary world, we might think that the weather is not so important. We have clothing and homes that help us deal with almost any weather. However, in ancient times, the weather was a matter of life and death every day. If the rain did not fall at the right time of year, the crops would not grow and people would die. That is why the words of the blessing change over the course of the year; we pray for the right weather that is needed in each season.
Our mortality is the second major theme of the blessing. We human beings are temporary and we realize that death is the common fate of everyone who lives. The blessing refers to God as the source of life and death. When we think of God's power in our lives, we also think about the fragility of our lives, about how life is a gift from God, and how death is part of the reality of the world.
The traditional version of this blessing made the theme of life and death even more clear. The older version of the blessing uses the words in parentheses that speak of God who "revives the dead." The Reform Movement originally changed those words to "gives life to all" in both the English and the Hebrew. The early Reformers rejected the traditional language because it refers to the idea that God will bring all those who have died back to life at the end of time – a literal belief that is rejected by Reform Judaism.
However, the idea of God "reviving the dead" does not have to be understood on a literal level. We can think of God as reviving us from death when we are healed from sickness or when we emerge from a life threatening situation. Also, we can think of God "reviving the dead" when we keep people alive in our memories after they have died. Mishkan T'filah was the first prayerbook to offer both the traditional form of the blessing (in parentheses) and the revised language of the Reform Movement.
In our prayerbook Mishkan Tefilah, the Amidah can be found:
on pages 205-208 in the student copy
on pages 323-326 in the congregant copy