Prayers In Biblical And Rabbinic Judaism

As one of the Three Monotheisms,Judaism is to some extent the way of lives of Jewish people.And as the the most ancient monotheism,Judaism influenced deeply on Christianity and Islam not only because of the Scripture,the Hebrew Bible,but the religious rituals as well.What we will talk mainly in this paper is Jewish Prayer,which had been the original model to some other religions in religious service.Prayer had a long historical source in Jewish culture.Various kinds of prayers were found in the Hebrew Bible,which helped the ancient Israelites to express their mixed feelings such as happiness,angry,petition,expostulation,confession,meditation,recollection,thanksgiving,praise and adoration.We could see such evidences here and there in the Bible,especially in Psalms.In the time of the First Temple,the leading way of worship to God was sacrifice.It was an important ritual in the Temple of Jerusalem that Jewish people sacrificed their offerings to God with the instructions of priests.However,in 586 B.C.E,the Babylonian army destroyed the First Temple and Jewish people lost their divine place to sacrifice.During their exile in Babylon,they tried to get torgther each week and said some prayers so that God wouldn’t forget their sufferings,which was regarded as the origin of common prayers.In 70 B.C.E,the Second Temple was destroyed and gradually the Jewish synagogues became the most important places where Jewish people got together to worship and prayed to God.That is to say,prayer had substituted sacrifice as the way to communicate with God.As a result of this,prayer was institutionalized during the time of Rabbinic Judaism.It was fixed to an obligation that Jews must pray three times a day and the contents of Jewish prayer was fixed as well.Prayer with regularity and formality was a significant step during the development of Judaism.It reduced the limitation of the divine Temple in sacrificial time and it made possible for Jews all around the world to continue the relationship with God through the way of prayer.In the third chapter of the paper,we will introduce the Siddur,the most important Jewish prayer book.We’re going to talk about the daily framework of Jewish prayer and make an introduction of two main prayers,Amidah and Shema.In the last part,we will try to give some discussion according to the dilemma that arose after the institutionalization of prayer.We’ll try to prove that the regularity and formality of common prayer wouldn’t destroy the spontaneity of it.On the contrary,it would surely reveal the essence of Judaism and make Jewish people in an ongoing relationship with God.