Myśl Żydowska do Pieśń nad pieśniami 8:5

Prayer comes in its perfected form only with the consciousness that the neshama is always praying⁵“For a person to be praying without this awareness is almost as if prayer is unnatural to his condition, and unnatural to the condition of the world, but for a person to pray with the awareness that really all the time I’m in the state of prayer, it’s just there are times when that comes to manifestation and times when it does not, is to recognize that I’m embedded in something which is the ongoing reality of myself – which is a whole different relationship with the act of praying. It’s not something which is external to what I am. When I come to pray, this is what I am, this is happening now not because I’ve been told to do it, not because I’m under obligation to do it, not even because I currently have a need to be doing it, but rather that all of those circumstances are actually the means by which, and the context within which, I come to the fullness of the expression of what it is that I really am.” R. Daniel Kohn. Does she not fly, and join to her beloved (Shir haShirim 8:5) without any break⁶The word הפסק means that which separates. In Orot HaTorah 9:7, Rav Kook comments on the mishna in Pirke Avot 3:7 "Rabbi Yaakov said: One who walks on the road while learning and interrupts (ומפסיק) his learning and says: 'How beautiful is this tree! How beautiful is this plowed field!' – The Torah considers it as if is liable to death." He explains that there are many levels of the world. Individuals who possess exalted spirituality obviously see the light of G–d shining in a tree, but the light of G–d which is found in the Torah is even brighter. A tree contains life, but the Torah contains the very source of life. Rav Tzvi Yehudah Kook adds that everything depends on how one looks at the tree: Is it an independent creation detached from the source of life or is it connected to the Living G-d? The problem is when one "interrupts” his learning, meaning that he breaks his connection to G–d in order to relate to the tree as something separate and disconnected. (from R’ Zvi Yehudah Kook, L’Netivot Yisrael vol. 2, p. 144). at all? It is only that, in the time of active prayer, the soul’s ceaseless prayer is revealed in actuality. This is her fineness and her pleasure, the glory and beauty of prayer, which is like a rose that opens its fair petals to greet the dew or the sun’s rays which appear on her in her radiance⁷“That’s the beauty, in a sense, of the circularity, or the relational aspect of prayer. It is a calling from G-d. It’s His sun shining on you which is then drawing out of you what it is that he has planted within you: that drive for fulfillment and for wholeness, which is reflected in words in tefillah. And so anytime you experience that movement towards growth and fulfillment, anytime you are expressing in your life, either an aspiration or an activity, that moving towards greater expression of what it is that you are, you are like this flower that is opening up….. But certainly it’s the case that when it comes to the Ribbono Shel Olam, who’s drawing out of our fulfillment, is as it were, drawing out His own fulfillment, because it is He who is us, who is in the expression of our souls.” R. Daniel Kohn; therefore, “Oh, that one would pray all day long!” (Berachot 21a) ⁸“This means that prayer, in the externality of the halachic issue, is something you can do anytime, but in the inner understanding of it - prayer is something which is being done all the time” R. Daniel Kohn