Saturday Afternoon Request, by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

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21 June 2013 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

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21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., dreaming, English poetry, English vernacular prayer, eros, Prayers as poems, quiet, Return to Eden, תחינות teḥinot

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	Help me to silence my mind’s aggravation alarm, to quiet the voice which says the to-do list matters, to temporarily eschew continuous partial attention.
	Open me to long slow conversations on the sunlit grass, to the beat of the hand-drummers who accompany the singing of psalms, to a boat lazily drifting on the glassy surface of my heart’s own pond.
	You’re waiting for me like a lover, eager to embrace me again. Remind me: this is the way back to Eden, the bloom on the thirteen-petaled rose.

Rachel Barenblat

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat (a/k/a the Velveteen Rabbi) serves Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is author of six volumes of poetry, among them 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia, 2011) and Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda, 2018). A founding builder at Bayit: Building Jewish, she resides in western Massachusetts. She has blogged as the Velveteen Rabbi since 2003.

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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)

Saturday Afternoon Request, by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

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