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Additional Preparatory Prayers

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הֲרֵינִי מְקַבֵּל עָלַי | A kavvanah to love your fellow as yourself, before prayer (ca. 1572)

A crucial intention to align one’s davvenen practice with the command to love one’s fellow as oneself per Leviticus 19:18, as recorded in Minhagei ha-Arizal–Petura d’Abba, p.3b by Ḥayyim Vital.

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16th century C.E., 54th century A.M., fellowship, כוונות kavvanot, Leviticus 19, love, love your fellow as yourself, Openers, school of the ARI z"l

Contributor(s):

Yitsḥak Luria and Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Reverence (CCAR 1923)

“Reverence” is the thirty-ninth prayer found in ברכה ותהלה Blessing and Praise: A Book of Meditations and Prayers for Individual and Home Devotion (CCAR 1923), pp. 130-132.

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Additional Preparatory Prayers

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20th century C.E., 57th century A.M., English vernacular prayer, exhortation, humility, דע לפני מי אתה עומד Know Before Whom You Stand, פחד paḥad (dread), תפילות קודם התפילה Prayers before Praying, teḥinot in English

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (transcription), Unknown and Central Conference of American Rabbis [CCAR]

Duty (CCAR 1923)

“Duty” is the fortieth prayer found in ברכה ותהלה Blessing and Praise: A Book of Meditations and Prayers for Individual and Home Devotion (CCAR 1923), pp. 133-134.

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Additional Preparatory Prayers, Addenda

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20th century C.E., 57th century A.M., English vernacular prayer, exhortation, performing mitsvot, tawfqid, teḥinot in English

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (transcription), Unknown and Central Conference of American Rabbis [CCAR]

“Just Walk Beside Me” (לֵךְ פָּשׁוּט לְצִדִּי | امشي بجانبي | נאָר גיין לעבן מיר), lines from an unknown author circulating in 1970; Jewish adaptation with translations in Aramaic, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic

Variations of the original three lines culminating with “…walk beside me…” first appear in high school yearbooks beginning in 1970. The earliest recorded mention we could find was in The Northern Light, the 1970 yearbook of North Attleboro High School, Massachusetts. In the Jewish world of the early to mid-1970s, a young Moshe Tanenbaum began transmitting the lines at Jewish summer camps. In 1979, as Uncle Moishy, Tanenbaum published a recording of the song under the title “v’Ohavta” (track A4 on The Adventures of Uncle Moishy and the Mitzvah Men, volume 2).

Categories:

Travel, Social Justice, Peace, and Liberty, 🇺🇸 National Brotherhood Week, Additional Preparatory Prayers,

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20th century C.E., 58th century A.M., political and religious anarchism, Arabic translation, Aramaic translation, children's education, Hebrew translation, love your fellow as yourself, Pedagogical songs, Universal Peace, universalist, universalist prayers, Yiddish translation, זמירות zemirot

Contributor(s):

Moshe Tanenbaum, Unknown, Aharon N. Varady (transcription), Aharon N. Varady (translation) and Isaac Gantwerk Mayer (translation)

שִׁוִּיתִי | Shiviti: perceiving the world as an expression of divine Oneness

Given that the Torah forbids impressing our imaginations with illustrations of the divine, some other method is necessary to perceive divine Oneness. One method is found in the verse in Psalms 16:8, “I have set YHVH before me at all times.”

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Art & Craft, Additional Preparatory Prayers, Shiviti

Tags:

meditation, Openers, שויתי shiviti

Contributor(s):

Andrew Meit and Aharon N. Varady

האותיות של האבג״ד בעברית | A Periodic Table of the Hebrew Aleph Bet Emphasizing Phonetic Grouping, Symbolic Association, and Diversity of Letter Form

Basic Hebrew letter and vowel lists adorn the opening pages of a number of siddurim published a century ago — evidence of the centrality of the Jewish prayer book as a common curricular resource. But the Hebrew letters are not only essential to fluency in Hebrew language, they are also the atomic elements composing the world of the rabbinic Jewish imagination. This is especially so for those who conceive in their devotional literary practices an implicit theurgical capability in modifying and adapting the world of language though interpretation, translation, and innovative composition. To create a world with speech relies on thought and this creative ability is only limited by the facility of the creator to derive meaning from a language’s underlying structure. This, therefore, is a table of the Hebrew letters arranged in order of their numerical value, in rows 1-9, 10-90, and 100-900, so that elements with similar numerical structure, (but dissimilar phonetic amd symbolic attributes) appear in vertical columns. Attention has been given to the literal meaning of the letter names and the earliest glyph forms known for each letter in the Hebrew abgad.

Categories:

Art & Craft, Additional Preparatory Prayers, Theurgy

Tags:

Aleph-Bet, gematria, otiyot

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady

A prayer for every day in the Gregorian year 2026, by Miriam Rubin

A prayer for every day in the Gregorian year 2026, by Miriam Rubin, was offered in the first week of January, on 5 Jan 2026.

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Additional Preparatory Prayers

Tags:

21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., English vernacular prayer, tawfqid, universal

Contributor(s):

Miriam Rubin

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃ (תהלים צ:יז) · "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." (Psalms 90:17)

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