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Rabbi Mendy Herson's Blog

Thoughts from, and conversations with, Rabbi Herson

The Crown Jewels

Look at a sparkling diamond, exuding its brilliance. Where does this stone come from and how did it get to this gorgeous state?
Before it got to your piece of jewelry, your diamond was deep in the earth, covered by dirt. Then someone mined, purified, cleansed and polished the gem, making it worthy of its glorious setting.
The Talmud teaches that when we pray sincerely, an Angel lifts our humanly-uttered prayers aloft and “weaves the letters into crowns for G-d.” In other words, our words are diamonds, mined from the depths of our psyche, so precious that they crown the Divine. Our prayers are more precious than we may think.
Chassidic thought looks at the struggle of finding focus and authenticity in prayer as an exhausting, yet purifying, exercise.
A. Focused, meditative thought, without any intrusion from the psyche’s ‘floating junk,’ isn’t easy to maintain. When we pray, trying to forge a bond with the Divine, and manage to find a connection which pulls us through the static to bond with the Divine, we come out stronger. Like a diamond coming through the soil, you’ve been ‘cleansed’ by your internal battle.
B.  Pouring your heart out to G-d, in a genuine - let it all flow – way, isn’t easy. It’s humbling to recognize that you don’t have all the answers, and that you need help from something higher than yourself. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, it’s also liberating. On the other side of that ‘prayer therapy,’ you will have grown.
So a few words of poetic Talmudic metaphor actually hold a powerful life lesson: The words of your genuine, committed prayer are actually precious gems. The morsels of your emotion and energy, breaking through the ‘dirt’ of your life, are deeply precious to G-d. In fact, they represent the very reason for which G-d created the world, the desire that we would reach out for Him. The words of your sincere prayer form the very essence of G-d’s Presence in Creation, the Divine Crown. When you reach out for Him, He couldn’t be happier.

Try it today.

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