Davening on Yom Kippur

You have to have a baal tefilah that has a good voice like by us… I guess I’m a little biased on that.

If you are really thrown inside your davening, and shuckling hard etc. it makes it pass fatser (and more meaningful), and then if you space out for a couple of minutes here and there, it’s not so bad. “Echad Hamemaet vechad hamarbeh, ubilvad sheyechaven es libo leshomayim” (I hope I quoted that right:)

The Baal T’filla makes the difference… if there’s a geshmake davening – the time flies!!

Try to get inspiration from the people around you- real emotion, real kavonah, real tears.

Listen- you’ve got real aveiros… (we all do)

In my case I’m just normally totally lost. My Hebrew is just not up to following the davening. On a regular Shabbat I can more or less keep up due to knowing the text reasonably well, but on YK and RH there is no way I can do it.

ZachKessin- with an English machzor, try learning the meaning of the t’fillos (if not every word, at least the concept of each) a few weeks before… even now, it’s not too late to start with a few main t’fillos.

Go through the ‘ahl chet’s and some other main t’fillos that are repeated throughout.

If possible, take an English machzor to shul- you can use it as reference here and there.

This is the biggest opportunity we’ve got- make some time to understand what we’re davening for.

Much Hatzlocha!

A chassidic tale comes to mind: An am ho’oretz wanders into a shtibbel on erev YK as people are preparing for Kol Nidre. He picks up a siddur and looks in, but he is bewildered by the many pages and strange letters. All around him are covered in tallesim, humming, wimpering, so he goes up to the front where the Rebbe is sitting facing the people. He asks: “Rebbe, where are we holding? The Rebbe looks up, and in tears says: Me? I am holding by last Chanuka!”

If you can, try rereading the slichot, and if you can find them in an old mahzor, the Slichot for Yom Kippur. I came into possesion of a stand alone volume of slichot YK from Zhitomir about 130 years old, with pages dimpled I think by tears. You can also find them in old mahzorim from the twenties often British, but the english translations are not true to text, or as regesh provoking. Hatzlacha in Avoda

I use a Hebrew/English Machzor (Props to Artscroll for excellent work here) but I still get lost. Maybe I will see if my Rabbi has some time to sit down with me Shabbat afternoon to go over some of it with me. OK we won’t get all of the teffilah done, but if we can at least catch a few bits It may go a long way to helping me feel less lost.

Email sent to my Rabbi, hopefully we can do this 🙂

–Zach

Reading Tefillah Zaka gets me in the right frame of mind (my Hebrew comprehension is pretty good, but if you have an English Machzor, I’d say reading the English is more important than “saying the words”).

Some machzorim have stories on the bottom, “below the line” which I find interesting. I daven in a Gerrer Shtibel so we finish Mussaf around 2PM. Between 2 and the start of mincha (usually 5PM) I relieve my wife from watching the kids so she can daven and try to learn myself. In a way the Gerrer Chassidim are part of “Yeshivas Mordechai Hatzadik” of Yom Kippur because when they close their machzorim, many of them open up a sefer.

;

if u understand how serious yom kipor is u wouldn’t have a problem i’m not saying i have but we should for sure strive to

Just a follow up. Yom Kippor this year was much better than last year where I was very frustrated. This year I felt much better and I think it was much more meaningful.

In the middle of the amidah somebody approches me and starts telling me, you have my chair and you have my machzor, well what a test, and guess what? I didnt have her chair or machzor. You see. This is just the way of the Yrzer Hara to interrupt kavanah.

Bemused: Just wondering if you noticed my post on top of Page 3 of the Kapporos: Chicken thread?

My sons have the Artscroll interlinear machzor. I’ve always found it to be counter-intuitive in that you read the words themselves from left to right, but have to read the sentences from right to left (since they’re located beneath the Hebrew words).

I’ve been using the same Metsudah machzor for the last twenty plus years*. Yes, the instructions are not as clear as in Artscroll, but I’ve always found that format much easier to use than the Artscroll format.

The Wolf

* I spent RH/YK in Scranton davening in the yeshiva one year when I was about fifteen. On Yom Kippur, they distributed a sheet of paper listing which pyutim they’d be saying in each of the tefillos. Twenty some odd years later, that folded up paper is *still* in my machzor. I use it as a bookmark.