Like most American Jews, I did not grow up with any meaningful connection to prayer. The suburban synagogue of my childhood was full of performance — an operatic cantor belting out Lewandowski’s Avinu Malkeinu and a rabbi intoning English phrases that always felt stilted or fake. I have no memory as a child or teen of ever connecting authentically to prayer in English or in Hebrew.
It took me years to discover that Jewish prayer can be one of the most nourishing, grounding and alive practices available to us. Not just occasionally. Not just on Shabbat with a gifted prayer leader. On a random Tuesday morning, alone in a backyard, in 30 minutes, with a siddur and a pair of binoculars for spotting birds.
That is what I want to talk about.
What Most of Us Were Never Taught
Here is the problem: Most of us were taught the what of Jewish prayer — the words, the order, the standing and sitting — but never the how. The inner dimension of prayer, what is called in Hebrew the penimi’ut, was absent. We were handed a siddur, pointed toward a seat and just encouraged to join in.
It’s a commonplace to say that Jewish prayer is hard. People will point out that one translation for prayer is avodah, which means “work” in Modern Hebrew. I have met way too many committed Jews, many of them rabbis, for whom prayer is not a powerful practice. They do it, it’s nice, it’s good to be in community they’ll say. They do it even though they don’t feel like doing it. “Judaism is about obligation, and we do things not because we enjoy doing it, but because we take it on as an obligation, etc.” Or, I have seen many people who are happy to go to services when a charismatic prayer leader is leading but feel no motivation to pray on their own.
I truly believe it doesn’t have to be that way.
Approached with the right inner orientation, some practice and a few essential tools, Jewish prayer can bring insight, joy, resilience, open-heartedness and a felt sense of connection to the Living Being of Existence. It can become — and I say this as someone for whom it was often not easy — the most precious and nourishing sustained moments of the day.
When we feel that aliveness in the body, gratitude often arises almost spontaneously. And gratitude is one of the best places to pray from.
Starting Where You Are: The Body
Here is what nobody told me in synagogue, and what I had to learn from my remarkable longtime teacher, Rabbi Miles Krassen: You cannot simply sit down, open a siddur and expect anything good to happen. The single most important thing you can do before beginning to daven is to relax the body.
This sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But its importance cannot be overstated. Think about what synagogue prayer usually asks of us: People mill around chatting until the service starts, and then suddenly, we’re supposed to shift into a prayerful mode on a dime. That often sets us up for failure.
Before anything else, we need what the tradition calls hakhanah, or preparation. For me, this usually takes the form of a body-scan meditation: five or so minutes of slow, attentive inner sensing, moving from the crown of the head down through the face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, belly, thighs, knees and feet. Not straining or trying to feel something in particular. Just sensing. Softening. Arriving.
What this does neurologically is shift us out of the narrow, analytical left-brain mode that divides the world into separate things and runs the to-do list into a more receptive, holistic, right-brain mode. It is this shift that makes it possible for the words of prayer to come from somewhere real inside us.
The underlying theology of this practice is itself profound. As we learn from Hasidic teachers like the Meor Eynaim, our bodies are a mikdash me’at — a miniature sanctuary for the Divine Presence. The energy we can feel subtly pulsing through us in an inner sensing practice is not merely physiological. It is hayyut, the Divine life force, flowing into us from moment to moment. Barukh oseh bereishit, Blessed is the One who does the ongoing work of creation, continuously, right now, in us.
When we feel that aliveness in the body, gratitude often arises almost spontaneously. And gratitude is one of the best places to pray from.
The Hidden Love in the Heart
Once the body has softened and has become receptive, we turn our attention to the heart — specifically, to what the Habad Hasidic tradition calls ahavah mesuteret, hidden love, or ahavah tivit, natural love. The teaching is that a spiritual love for God is already present in every human heart, factory-installed, as it were. We don’t have to create it from scratch. We only have to awaken it.
When I first heard this idea [1], I was skeptical. I was not the kind of person who had love for God welling up in his heart. But I was encouraged to test it out — to trust that it was there, just beneath the surface, and to do the work of coaxing it out. And over time, I found that it was true.
This is the purpose of the opening section of the morning service, Pesukei de-Zimrah. The point is not to cover every prayer or psalm in the section. The point is to find a few verses, maybe three or four, that genuinely open your heart, and to dwell in them until something softens and warms inside you. These become what I think of as “reminder grooves”: pathways back to the open-hearted state that we lay down through repeated, attentive practice.
Barukh She’amar, for instance — Blessed is the One who spoke the world into existence — almost always finds me looking up from the page. The words Barukh merakhem al ha’aretz, Barukh merakhem al ha’bri’ot — Blessed is the One who is compassionate toward the Earth, toward all creatures — are almost impossible to say outdoors (or at least looking out a window) without feeling their truth. You see the bumblebee moving through the pollinator garden, the morning light flowing through the trees, and the words become simply true.
Being in the heart, in the simple praise state — gratitude, wonder, love, appreciation, often all at once — is a profoundly wholesome place to inhabit.
The practice of Hitbodedut, speaking directly to God, is a way of processing the vicissitudes of life within a compassionate holding — of making an offering of one’s realness, one’s tears, one’s unresolved complexity.
Speaking Directly to God
Beyond working with the prayers of the siddur, one of the most powerful tools available to us is what Reb Nachman of Breslov calls hitbodedut: speaking directly to God in your own words, in your own language, from your own heart.
Reb Nachman of Breslov considered this the essence of prayer — what Jewish prayer looked like before it was formalized into a fixed liturgy. He directed his students to seclude themselves daily and simply pour out their words before God: their struggles, their gratitude, their longing, their vulnerability.
This is usually an intensely private thing to do. But once I witnessed someone do this freely and openly. At a Jewish retreat center in the mid-2000s, I watched Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi daven aloud for a few minutes in English after he finished the Amidah. He stood there with a microphone, eyes closed and simply spoke to God — directly, easily, as though nothing could be more natural. I remember the realness of it, and the way he addressed God in Ashkenazi Hebrew as Ribbono shel Oylam, Master of the Universe, with complete, unhurried warmth. Reb Zalman wanted us all to see that this kind of easy intimacy with God was possible, and the experience has never left me.
Hitbodedut is about cutting to the chase about what is actually true for you right now. What are you struggling with? What fills you with gratitude? What do you need help seeing clearly? The practice becomes a way of processing the vicissitudes of life within a compassionate holding — of making an offering of one’s realness, one’s tears, one’s unresolved complexity.
It is also, over time, a way of cultivating a genuine love relationship with the Holy One. There is a quality of intimacy that develops from showing up, day after day, and saying: Here I am. It’s me again.
Why Outdoors Changes Everything
I cannot overstate how much more nourishing, powerful, and alive davening becomes when you do it outdoors. The presence of hayyut — that Divine life-force — is so much more palpable in the natural world: in the birdsong, the wind on the skin, the subtle shifting shades of green. The words of the prayers, many of which were composed by people who lived close to the earth, come alive in a way they simply cannot indoors.
Reb Nachman adds something even more striking to this: that when we pray outside, the plants surrounding us join in our prayer, adding their own power and intention. He teaches that prayer is called sikha, conversation, because it is connected to the word si’akh, meaning plant or shrub.[2] In his reading, when Yitzhak “went out to pray in the field toward evening,” (Genesis 24:63) he was praying with the power of the field itself.
I don’t need to take that literally to find it deeply true. When I sit in my backyard with my tallit and tefillin, hearing the Song Sparrow twenty feet away, feeling the sun beginning to warm my arms, something in the prayer reaches further and settles deeper. The natural world becomes a co-davener.
An Invitation
This is a practice available to all of us — liberal Jews, traditional Jews, unaffiliated Jews, skeptical Jews, Jews who haven’t opened a prayer book in years. It does not require fluent Hebrew. It does not require theological certainty. It does not require a synagogue, a minyan or a charismatic prayer leader.
It requires a willingness to show up, to soften the body, to open the heart and to trust — even provisionally, even just as an experiment — that there is a Compassionate Presence that hears.
Our tradition has a word for that provisional trust: emunah. Often translated as “faith,” it shares a root with the word for training (imun). It is something we develop through practice, through showing up, through accumulating small experiences of response and connection, and unexpected tears and the occasional inexplicable joy.
You don’t have to believe it first. You just have to try it and let the evidence of your own experience speak.
[1] Also from Rabbi Miles Krassen.
[2] Likkutei Moharan Tinyana 11.
