אני קושית יפה/I’m a Cute Black Girl Pg 16

Prayer can happen in many ways. To me prayer has always been a personal conversation between myself and G-d. Of course I have asked him for many things and I will shamefully admit that I have tried to make negotiations with him, but we all know that that is just a waste of energy, because G-d is a much higher being and technically needs nothing from me and knows the outcomes of all my actions before I even think of doing them.

Prayer is a lot of things and everyone has a different analogy for it, but it all comes down to the same thing. It is between you and G-d.

Over the past few weeks, we have discussed prayer in various ways and have learnt the many Jewish prayers. Last night I realized something, that I should have probably picked up on many years ago; is that every Jewish prayer starts of the same…

 …Blessed are you O Lord our God, King of the Universe.

And then the prayer goes on with the blessing or praise of the food we are about to eat, or occasion we are being grateful for. Looking at that phrase I think about the many times when I have wanted something from my father, I generally always start off with doing something that he likes, just to make him feel good so I am more likely to get a positive response from him.  

From Wednesday I have been suffering real back pain and so I have been unable to prepare Shabbat Supper for tonight…my weekly Thursday/Friday routine has been me going to the shop to make my purchases so I can create the perfect Shabbat meal and bring in Shabbat correctly. Today I don’t have Challah, but I do have a few slices of bread.

My Rabbi taught us, a few weeks ago, that the Shabbat Hamotzi isn’t about making the prayer over Challah. He freezes a Challah every week and because it should be done with 2 Challahs he will sometimes just use a Pita Bread. Guess tonight I will be doing Hamotzi with regular ‘Albany Best of Both Worlds (Brown bread pretending to be White) bread’