AMIDAH
My God, open my lips and my mouth shall declare Your praise. 1 i¨Src£` GOD OF HISTORY KEx ¨A Blessed are You, our God , and God of our ancestors, God of Abraham, God of Sarah, God of Isaac, God of Rebecca, and God of Jacob, God of Rachel and God of Leah, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, God beyond, generous in love and kindness, and possessing all. You remember the good deeds of those before us, and therefore in love bring rescue to the generations, for such is Your being. During the Ten Days of Penitence add: Sovereign Who delights in life, recall us to life and record us in the Book of Life for Your own sake, God of life! The Sovereign who helps and saves and shields. Blessed are You God, who shields Abraham who remembers Sarah.
introducing ourselves as a community to God: ‘we are the descendants of that same Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, whom You called to Your service’. We list some of God’s powers and qualities revealed to different generations in Biblical times. Like the court protocol when addressing a monarch, this introduction makes a formal beginning to the blessings and prayer that follow where we present ourselves and our requests to God. In our progressive view the tradition has not adequately expressed the equal contribution of women to our understanding and experience of God. God pakad , ‘visited’ (‘became directly engaged with’), Sarah (Gen 21:1); God answered the question asked by Rebecca (Gen 25:23); God responded to the prayers of Rachel and Leah (Gen 30). We have included their names and their individual relationship with God. 1 Ps 51:17.
g ¨Y §t ¦Y i ©z¨t §U i¨Poc£` MyGod, open my lips ... This verse, from Psalm 51:17, comes as a personal meditation, ‘I’, before the Amidah itself which is a collective prayer, ‘we’. It affirms that I personally feel part of the prayers that the community is about to say. Also it expresses the hope that my prayers are a true expression of my personal relationship with God. This personal element is matched by the meditation that comes immediately after the close of the Amidah , concluding with Psalm 19:15, emphasising the integrity between the words I speak and my inner thoughts. zFa£` Ancestors The Amidah , the ‘standing prayer’, is known as the ‘eighteen blessings’, though during the week when the full set are recited, the number was expanded at some time in the past to become nineteen. It opens with the avot , the ‘patriarchs’, to which
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