Conversations with the Creator: Finding Depth in Daily Tefillah

Imagine that you have been charged, hired for a very special job, that you are to step out in front of 2,000 American citizens and give an impassioned plea, a public speech, to fundraisers for your organization. You had a speech writer write down some notes trying to encourage emotion, feeling, hopefully garner some large donations. There's only one small challenge and that is that your speech writer wrote this beautiful speech for you to deliver in Chinese. You can imagine that that speech will hardly be emotive or fruitful. For a speech that really sings like a song and delivers a big impact, you have to feel it. You have to know where to put your emphasis and how to stir your own heart before you embark on trying to stir others to action. So, when it comes to our speeches that we deliver three times a day, when we get up we are praying To Hashem. I was thinking that we spend nearly 700 minutes weekly davening to Hashem. If you daven all three Tafelos and you only give yourself 15 minutes to daven Ma'arav and Mincha'i'tch. But if we don't understand what we're saying, I don't think that it's hard for us to agree that it probably won't make that large of an impact, that Tafela probably won't stir our soul and therefore probably won't encourage us to pray with heart. The call to action is that we learn what Tafela is, what the words are, the Purish Hamilim. If you're like me, you probably enjoy Hashivenu or Modim a bit more than you care for Vala, ma'al, sheenim or Ritse in Shimonashri, but most likely we're all in a similar boat because we just don't understand the Purish Hamilim, the very basic translation of the words. Tafela stands at the very center of the universe, quite literally. It's one of the things that constantly needs motivation and I believe the very beginning of the journey towards passionate prayer is learning the basic translation of the words, why they are very personal and how, when we step forward to give a speech, of all speeches, and we pray to the Holy One blessed be he we understand what we're saying and hopefully, like this, that Tafela will mean more to us and maybe, just maybe Hashem will be more receptive to our prayers.