We turn now to the Amidah, literally, the “standing prayer,” recited…wait for it…standing. It is, in many ways, the high point of the service. When the rabbis referred to “the” prayer, it was the Amidah to which they were referring. The Amidah is recited morning noon and night. During the week, through 13 blessings, it outlines an entire political and spiritual program for returning to Israel, rebuilding Jerusalem, and establishing sovereignty. On Shabbat and holidays, it emphasizes instead the sanctity of the day in question, using a single blessing to shift our emotional focus from the future to the sacred present.
The Amidah always begins with three prayers of praise, and concludes with three prayers of thanks. The variation in blessings is found between the praise and the thanks.
The first of the blessings of praise refers to our ancestors. It begins, “Blessed are You Ad-nai, our G-d and G-d of our ancestors, G-d of Abraham, G-d of Isaac, G-d of Jacob, G-d of Sarah, G-d of Rebecca, G-d of Rachel and G-d of Leah.”
As is often the case, the language, when translated literally, seems a little clumsy. We are used to streamlining language, so we would write, “G-d of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, etc.” Why instead “G-d of Abraham, G-d of Isaac, G-d of Jacob.” The great theologian Martin Buber provided an answer: because each of our ancestors experienced G-d in their own way. Sure, it was the same G-d in a philosophical sense. The One G-d. In a practical sense, though, the G-d of Abraham was not the same as the G-d of Isaac, and so forth. Experientially, G-d appears to each of us differently.
And emphasizing this in the first blessing of the prayer goes to underscore the sophistication of the Jewish theological system. Rather than demanding uniformity in our experience of G-d, we relish diversity. The important thing is not that we have the same experience. It is that we use our common tradition to have our unique individual experience.