— for those crafting their own prayerbooks and sharing the content of their practice
This is an archive of prayers, prayer-poems, and songs for Yom haKippurim (the Day of Expiation), the second of the three Yamim Nora’im (Days of Awe).
Click here to contribute a prayer you have written, or a transcription or translation of a historical work by someone else.
“Avinu Malkeinu,” dvar tefillah by Rabbi David Seidenberg (neohasid·org)
The words of Avinu Malkeinu are a little different from the standard translation. It doesn’t say in Hebrew, “we have no good deeds” (ein lanu ma’asim tovim), but rather, “there are no deeds in us” (ein banu ma’asim). The p’shat (literal meaning) implies that whatever we have done in the past does not have to live inside of us — we can release our deeds and be released from them, fully, to start over, like a newborn, to become whoever we need to become. . . .