Related Customs
Many Jews sway their body back and forth during prayer. This practice (referred to as shoklen in Yiddish) is not mandatory, and in fact the kabbalist Isaac Luria felt that it should not be done. In contrast, the German Medieval authority Maharil (Rabbi Jacob Molin) linked the practice to a statement in the Talmud that the Mishnaic sage Rabbi Akiva would sway so forcefully that he ended up at the other side of the room when praying (Talmud tractate Berachot).
Many are accustomed to giving charity before, during (especially during Vayivarech David) or after prayer, in the hopes that this will make their prayer more likely to be heard.
Read more about this topic: Jewish Prayer
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“So universal and widely related is any transcendent moral greatness, and so nearly identical with greatness everywhere and in every age,—as a pyramid contracts the nearer you approach its apex,—that, when I look over my commonplace-book of poetry, I find that the best of it is oftenest applicable, in part or wholly, to the case of Captain Brown.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We set up a certain aim, and put ourselves of our own will into the power of a certain current. Once having done that, we find ourselves committed to usages and customs which we had not before fully known, but from which we cannot depart without giving up the end which we have chosen. But we have no right, therefore, to claim that we are under the yoke of necessity. We might as well say that the man whom we see struggling vainly in the current of Niagara could not have helped jumping in.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)