How does God affect our prayers? I will be using the Amidah to prove my points. In the siddur, there are prayers that involve god and others that don’t require a god. In a lot of prayers, God gives us specific things. But there are ways to get that thing anyway. For example, in the Amidah, there’s a blessing that gives us knowledge, but we can get knowledge either through people, school, books, etc.

 God only helps us when we truly need help. Let’s say we were back in Egypt for hundreds of years, we wouldn’t know what to do after we get free. God will help us with the necessities but he takes a passive role after a certain point. Think about your teachers when you were little you’re teachers helped you with things like wiping after using the bathroom. They taught you to use a pencil and taught you manners. God is kind of like a teacher when you grow up, they take a passive role in ur learning until we truly need the help to grow and understand how to live. All these small things that your teachers do God does in a different way. 

At first, I thought that God is always active and we are constantly using his help but now I think differently. I think that God takes a passive role in our lives, he still listens to prayers and our pain and sorrow but he doesn’t react because he doesn’t feel he needs to. He lets us learn and grow as MJDS does with our learning. They leave most of it to us and then watch from the sidelines. Since we have evolved God has taken the more passive approach instead of the super active I need to talk to the Jewish people about so and so and this event. We don’t need the helping hand we are the teenagers of Judaism. We have grown past the time where we needed God’s guidance constantly. There are multiple times in history where we were told what to do. But while being teenagers of the Jewish people(meaning that the people in the Torah were the children and now we grew up to teenagers where we break off from god.) everything can be great it can also be terrible. For example without God’s guidance, there are obviously going to be little bumps in the road. One of these bumps was in the Jews’ homeland. Where a jew Killed another Jew. But God didn’t come out because we were going to learn from the experience. 

So, I will leave you with this. Do you think that God is constantly active or do you think he takes a passive approach? Personally, I think that he is active when he needs to be. 

Teachers think about small things. Things that are not good for your pencil.  God can be active but in different ways than a long time ago. God gives help when really need it. God only gives things that you need in time.

In Tefillah, I joined the musical Tefillah group. I regretted this choice but I had to stick through it. We learned most about Kevah and Kavanah. Kevah meant structure which I am a big fan of. Kavanah means meaning, I thought I lacked in this department. I want to work on this. I need meaning in life and I think that I improved a little bit. Keva I also worked on since this class had us working alone we had to make our own structure. We had to make our own tune to a prayer. I worked with 3 friends on this project. It was very awkward making a tune. It felt like nothing worked until a group member went on the keyboard and then it clicked.