Yom Kippur. Amidah and Viduy With Explanations. Sfard

Nusah Sfard

The book you hold in your hands is dedicated to one of the most important spiritual aspects of our prayer life. This book is for those who have already realized the importance of the Jewish public prayer, and to some extent practiced it, but still not mastered the language of the saints or not familiar enough with the classical Jewish source material.

Prayers composed by the great Jewish prophets and the sages of antiquity. These texts have an unusually deep and multi-dimensional semantic content. Therefore, when uttered correctly (with the appropriate attitude kavonoy), they have a powerful impact on all worlds: higher and lower. The Jewish tradition of carefully preserved these texts and denounced them to us through centuries of persecution and trials.

The book contains the text line by line translation and brief comments of the central prayer of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) amides. Name of the Amidah comes from the verb לעמוד (stand), and indicates that the prayer is said standing up. The book consists of partially processed fragments of the two previous books of the authors: "Prayer Viduy with explanations" 1 and "Prayer of Eighteen Blessings to explain" 2.

Statement of principle in writing the book was to make it suitable for direct use in prayer. Such an approach leads to minimize the comments accompanying the text molitvy.Pri necessary, we will put the appropriate extensions and additions apart from prayer, at the bottom of the page.

As already mentioned, the text of the Amidah are extremely rich and layered semantic structure. Brevity does not allow comments to present this structure more or less complete. We have restricted the direct explanation of meaning (as they say in the holy language פשט), as the basic requirements of the law of prayer is that prayer should understand this is the meaning and focus on it.

Despite the adoption of the restriction, we, nevertheless, can not qualify for the full disclosure of even a simple sense, as in the framework of this level of understanding, there are different (and sometimes many) approaches and interpretations. Nevertheless, we hope that, with God's help, the book will be useful and will help to make our prayers more meaningful and thoughtful. We thanks to the Creator for the opportunity to implement the project, as well as for the fact that a lot of people in some way able to take part in it. We wish them good health and yidishe nahes.