Mechon Hadar's Tefillah Toolkit takes a prayer or a section of a service from Jewish liturgy and explores it from three perspectives: content, meaning, and music. Together as a package, we explore what the prayer is about, what it means to pray it, and how to get a community praying it together.

In this issue:

• Elie Kaunfer analyzes the seventeenth blessing of the daily Amidah: Retzeih. What are its themes? Why does it have such a sharp change of topic at the end? And how do we think about references to sacrifices in prayers in general?
• Dena Weiss explores what it means to try and align your will with God's. What is praying the weekday Amidah, with all of its requests in the plural, supposed to make us experience?
• Joey Weisenberg discusses the distinctions and connections between nusah and niggun. Where and how can one add moments of coming together as a community in song to the daily Amidah? Includes his own composition, Binah's Niggun.