Last class, we began our in-depth textual analysis of the bracha of Modim, the seventeenth blessing of the Shemoneh Esrai. Today, we continue that analysis but with a hyperfocus on one small portion. As always, let’s start with the text of the bracha;
“We gratefully thank You, for it is You Who are HaShem, our G-d and the G-d of our forefathers for all eternity; Rock of our lives, Shield of our salvation are You from generation to generation. We shall thank You and relate Your praise – for our lives, which are committed to Your power and for our souls that are entrusted to You; for Your miracles that are with us every day; and for Your wonders and favors in every season – evening, morning, and afternoon. The Beneficent One, for Your compassions were never exhausted, and the Compassionate One, for Your kindnesses never ended – always have we put our hope in You.”
Our usual method of textual analysis is to cover a large portion (and sometimes even the entire portion) of a blessing for each class. Modim, given how long it is, will take up a few classes as-is but I’d like to extend that a class further by using today to focus our textual analysis on only three words of the blessing.
As we can see above, the blessing at one point discusses how HaShem’s wonders are with us in every season and during “evening, morning, and afternoon.” Those three words – evening, morning, and afternoon – will be the focus for today after I heard a wonderful vort recently on a podcast.
On his Three Steps Forward podcast, Rabbi Yitzchak Sprung had Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz on as his first guest and he shared a tremendous tip for how to improve our davening, and then offered a wonderful insight into the three words we’ll be focusing on today.
Rabbi Lebowitz, citing Rabbi Yisroel Reisman, explained that if we want to really enhance our prayers, we need to think small at first (a common theme found throughout this class). Therefore, Rabbi Lebowitz suggested focusing on three words in the entire Shemoneh Esrai, preferably at the beginning or the end, and spending months having proper concentration for just those three words. Not the entire blessing, not the entire Shemoneh Esrai, but commit to concentrating on just those three words. And when it’s been a few months, and you feel like you’ve mastered that set of three, you can then add on another three words.
Rabbi Lebowitz also mentioned one of his sets of three words and pointed us toward today’s lesson – the “evening, morning, and afternoon” found in the Modim blessing. Rabbi Lebowitz explained that he feels like he has three different portions of his life. He is the Rabbi of a shul in Woodmere, a rebbi at Yeshiva University, and a father and husband.
As he says these three words in Modim, he focuses how grateful he is to HaShem for each period of his life. As he says the word “evening”, he thinks about how the wonderful wife and children that HaShem gave to him. As he says “morning”, he focuses on the wonderful shul he gets to lead. And as he says “afternoon”, he thinks about all the wonderful students he gets to teach.
What an incredible two lessons for all of us! Perhaps we all can try to pick a set of three words found throughout the Shemoneh Esrai and commit to mastering concentration just during those three words for the next few months. (And hopefully this class will provide some avenues of how to think through those three words.)
And whether you pick the same three words as Rabbi Lebowitz, his glimpse into his own prayer offers us a wonderful example.
We may not all be leading a shul, or teaching students, or even yet married or have children. But we all have different things throughout the day that we can be grateful for. As we pray these three wordsi n the Modim prayer, we can commit to trying to focus on how grateful we should be for all phases of our life – at all times in our life!