By Rabbi Dan Lewin

Sukkot

During Rosh Hashanah, I stepped out into the hall of shul for a moment and saw a 13-year-old boy playing a silly game with his friend, laughing joyfully as if it were any other day.

The boy caught my eye. He is a successful student and a highly accomplished athlete. And I thought about my own childhood during the Days of Awe.

I remember when I was a kid going to shul, sitting next to my parents, bored through long services, periodically asking when we could take a break. The prayers were recited in English, the visiting cantor performed, and the rabbi tried to dazzle the crowd with a witty sermon, often mixed with politics and Israel. It was unfamiliar and boring for the average teenager, to say the least.

When our parents finally gave us permission to leave, we ran off enthusiastically to meet our friends and kids from other schools in Dallas in the halls. It was the highlight of the day. We were finally free — until some grumpy old man with bad breath, acting as a synagogue policeman, would catch us in the halls and yell at us for being noisy, ushering us back into the services.

All in all, we got to skip school, but we had no clue what the day was really about or what we were supposed to be doing there.

Times have changed. I have gained a much deeper appreciation and understanding of what prayer is actually about.

Today, my 13-year-old son sits beside me, praying fervently. And it made me think about how well we teach our children when something matters.

What are we teaching our children?

Take this boy in the hall, for example. He is an athlete. When he steps onto the court, he knows it’s a tournament with high stakes. The lights are on. It’s game time. He’s locked in. He knows there is a goal, and he knows his poise and effort matter.

Some might say, but prayer isn’t a competition. And that’s true — at least not in the usual sense.

So let’s take education. As ambitious parents in the Jewish community, we have done a remarkable job teaching our children the importance of education. We make choices about schools, classes and opportunities because we want our children to succeed. We teach them that when they are in class or taking an important test, they need to pay attention and strive to be their best. There is a goal. Their future matters. We teach them that their effort today can affect what opportunities are available to them tomorrow.

But when it comes to tefillah, we don’t always give them that same message.

Perhaps the general attitude is that children should be children, and prayer is for adults. But it doesn’t have to be that way. From an early age, we can teach our children that their words have impact, and that when they read the words of the siddur, there is something they are meant to accomplish.

I’m not talking about whether a child needs to pray for five minutes, 10 minutes or a half hour. It’s about the attitude and mentality. Does he understand that this is a holy day, that there is something happening, and that there is something for him to accomplish?

Shul is not a social gathering. It is a time for deep concentration and contemplation, and for the positive work of developing ourselves and connecting with God.

What is tefillah?

Perhaps part of the problem is that we have lost some of the deeper meaning of the word tefillah itself. Prayer has come to mean asking God for what we need: health, success, children, money and peace. And certainly, asking God for our needs is part of tefillah. But it is not the whole picture.

The word tefillah itself has deeper associations in the Torah. In different contexts, its linguistic root is connected with both struggle and connection. And that gives us an important insight into what tefillah actually involves.

There is an inner struggle involved in prayer. There are distractions, resistance, the yetzer hara and everything that pulls us away from concentrating and being present. We have to push through it. We have to practice. We have to work at it.

That is the battle of tefillah — the struggle to overcome everything that stands between us and genuine prayer.

But ultimately, the goal is connection. We are not simply coming to ask for things; we are coming to connect with God, to refine our inner selves, to align with a higher purpose, to change and grow. And connection takes effort.

And this isn’t just a message for our children. It’s a message for us, especially during the Tishrei holidays. We can laugh, joke and be social outside. But when we step into that room, there is a job to do.

From Tishrei to the rest of the year

In general, the month of Tishrei is divided into two basic parts that differ from one another, yet complete each other, making it one integral month and an introduction to the start of the year.

The first part, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, is permeated with the spirit of teshuvah. It is a time of introspection, reflection, prayer and tzedakah, when we move away from our previous state and strive toward greater spirituality and godliness.

Then come the colorful festivities of Sukkot. Now we enter a new mode with happiness, taking the connection we established during the High Holidays into our physical lives. Even our ordinary physical activities become part of the mitzvah.

This movement gives us the power throughout the year to “know Him in all your ways” (Proverbs 3:6) — to encounter godliness within the ordinary and to elevate our material lives.

And this same pattern plays out every day.

When we establish prayer in the morning as an anchor of the day, we do the work of tefillah first. We struggle through the distractions, connect with God, refine our souls and align our minds with a higher purpose to meet the day.

Then we walk out of shul to meet the day. That connection allows us to experience the true joy that comes after the spiritual grind, while encountering godliness within the ordinary and elevating our physical activities.

The pattern of Tishrei is also the pattern of every day: first prayer, and then the ability to carry that connection into all parts of life.

Rabbi Dan Lewin is director of the nonprofit Maayan Chai Foundation. For information, visit maayan-chai.org.