How to make davening meaningful all on our own

If someone would ask you what you walk away with after davening, what would you answer?

Many different sources share beautiful approaches to the purpose of tefillah (prayer). Some of us might even recognize most of them.

Yet we still struggle. Perhaps because we have a hard time pulling real, tangible gain from these beautiful yet very abstract ideas.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Tefillah is our means to get our wants and needs filled. Of course it’s extremely powerful in that way – but it doesn’t work automatically. If we hang our satisfaction in tefillah on how promptly and positively our prayers get answered, we’ll face some serious disappointment.

Tefillah is our opportunity to speak to Hashem and enjoy His closeness. This is absolutely true. It’s also distinctly hard to experience. Hashem doesn’t carry the conversation in a literal sense. So lots of us struggle to get into conversation mode at all. Which means we’re just repeating words.

Tefillah is about making a global difference by increasing Hashem’s flow of blessing and goodness to the world. This reflects a beautiful level of faith and spirituality. But it’s hard to understand, and even harder to quantify.

Tefillah is our chance to declare our belief in Hashem and confirm His rulership over the world. Again, a beautiful, lofty approach – but not one the average Yossel can easily connect to.

So. Let’s explore a fifth approach: Tefillah is designed to help us develop “eyes of emunah (faith in Hashem).”

When writing about emunah, Rav Wolbe defines it as much more than simple belief in Hashem’s existence. Emunah is the work of knowing, recognizing, seeing and appreciating the spiritual reality that exists behind the shell of our physical world. Fueling it. Sustaining it. Influencing every movement in it.

Because we’re human, we like to make judgments about life through our five senses. If we can’t see, hear, smell, feel, or taste something, we have a hard time trusting in its existence.

That’s why living with an awareness of the spiritual reality around us takes so much effort. And why we daven three times a day. Because Hashem gave us the gift of tefillah as a training ground to develop those “eyes of emunah.” To build our ability to look at the world and see Hashem a bit.

Three times a day, we paint a verbal picture of the spiritual reality we can’t sense with our eyes and ears. We speak about how Hashem guides the world. The attributes with which He acts toward us. How He hears and fulfills our requests. How good and great He is, so good and great that we sing His praises endlessly.

These are words of emunah. And speaking them builds our eyes of emunah.

Which gives us a concrete task to accomplish every time we open our siddurim. The task of sharpening our sense of emunah. Of expanding our awareness of the spiritual world fueling our physical one.

Yes, the words of Shacharis, Mincha and Maariv aren’t our own. Yes, we repeat the same ones day in and day out. But now we don’t need to find them boring. Each time we go over them, we can extract a new piece of emunah. We can develop ourselves, change as people. We don’t have to wait for anyone else’s input or feedback or explanation. At any time, we’re fully capable of doing this ourselves.

And each time we close our siddurim, we can do it with the satisfaction of leaving an experience with a tangible takeaway. We’re walking out with growth. Heightened awareness of Hashem. Deeper emunah.

Like the prayers of the chassidim harishonim (the original pious ones), tefillah approached this way lingers with us. It changes the way we go through our day – and leaves a tangible imprint on our entire lives.