Pray (with, and) for Emotion.

It’s Shabbos morning.

We are singing Ashrey, the song written by King David three thousand years ago, a song that I read three times a day for the past twenty years.

The words roll out of my mouth as my eyes drift around the room. I look at an individual who just began coming to Shul. He is looking into his prayer book, I can see him saying each word with care, one at a tome, savoring its meaning and rhythm. I ask myself, can the words have the same meaning for me after saying them all these years?

I begin to listen closely to the words I am saying. By now we are reading the blessings that precede the Shmah. I read “enlighten our eyes in your Torah, cause our hearts to cleave to your commandments and unite our heart to love and fear your name”.

I begin to realize that a person’s basic emotional needs don’t change. I want to love and feel loved, I want to be understood and I want to be appreciated. These needs never change. I really don’t need a new emotion every day.

I spend most of my life trying to re-experience the same basic feelings. When I was fourteen I felt something while Davening, I’m not sure how to describe it perhaps a feeling of connectedness, I spent the next six years in search of that feeling. Every now and then teaching makes me really happy. When I walk into a class I don’t wish for anything other then to feel that same joy.

The night after my wife and newborn daughter came back home from the hospital, I was lying in bed with my hospital band still around my wrist, I took out my green pad attempting to write down what I was feeling at that moment. Unable to accurately describe what I was feeling I just wrote, Guess what, I wish I can always feel what I feel right now.

So, just because I took the time yesterday to ask Hashem for my emotional needs of love, understanding, connectedness, does not mean that I want them any less today. So, after praying three times a day for twenty years, I could go to Shul on Shabbos and ask for what I really need right now. I need my heart to feel pure “Purify our heart to serve you with truth”