As we learned in the last chapter, God wants to give us the greatest pleasure—His presence in our lives, so that we feel connected to Him. Therefore, we are commanded, “To love the Lord your God listen to His voice and bond with Him because He is your life.” In other words, we should love God because God is our life—the very life force within every fiber of our being. Loving God is, therefore, synonymous with loving life. The Torah teaches, “You who bond with the Lord, your God, are alive totally today.” The more connected we feel to God the more alive we feel. How can we know if we are truly bonding with God? It’s when we feel totally alive, when our entire being is filled with a phenomenal vitality that we know we cannot honestly call our life our own. We feel God’s presence when we understand that all the powers within us are not from us. When we realize that our willpower, wisdom, insights, love and motor skills are really not ours but His, we experience ourselves serving to channel His powers into the world. In this state of connection, we feel the joy of purposeful and meaningful living. We also experience God’s presence when we encounter His mastery in the wonders of nature and see everything as a Divine masterpiece—a piece of the Master. However, as we mentioned earlier, God cannot give us this great gift of His presence unless we want Him in our lives. We must first know in our hearts that God’s presence is, indeed, the greatest gift we could ever hope to receive—that it is pure ecstasy. We give God pleasure, so to speak, when we want to receive what He wants to give us. Our problem is that we often get distracted from what’s eternally real and pursue temporal things. Not only does this not give God pleasure, it causes Him much pain, so to speak. There is an odd passage in the Book of Genesis, appearing just before the Flood, which says that God was “saddened in His heart.” The 15th century commentator Ovadiah ben Yaakov Sforno explains that God is sad when we are not ready or interested in receiving the goodness He wants to give us. God wants to give us a connection to Him and shower us with His loving presence, but we do not want it. Instead, we want money, property, clothing, sex, fame and power. This is similar to the sadness and pain a nursing mother feels when her baby does not want to suck. When a baby does not want to nurse from its mother, the mother experiences intense emotional and physical pain. God wants to give us the ultimate pleasure of Divine presence, a joy that is simply out of this world and yet we are chasing after other things. We can, however, remedy this problem by reciting the Amidah daily. With each of its requests, we arouse within us the desire to receive what is truly worth wanting, what God wants to give us. We give God great pleasure when we hunger to receive the gift of His presence and all the blessings it brings. When we want what is truly worth wanting, we give God pleasure and enable His blessings to flow into our lives. We then connect not only to God’s presence but also to our true self, because our true self (the soul) is only interested in God. King David expressed this so eloquently many times: o “Whom have I in heaven but You? And besides You, I desire none on earth … As for me, God’s nearness is my good.” o “My soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You.” o “For God alone my soul waits silently, from Him comes my salvation.” o “Yes, I will bless You all my life, in Your name I lift my hands. When with joyous language my mouth gives praise, it is as if my desire were sated with rich food.” The soul is not attracted to things, but rather to the presence of God manifest within them. Let’s use a work of art as an example. When we see a magnificent painting, we are not drawn to a canvas smeared with paint. Rather, we are drawn to the beauty of God that is channeled into the world through the image the painting portrays. But we often get confused. We see an attractive person and we admire him or her, not realizing that it is not the person who is so beautiful but God—beauty is an attribute of God, and this person is only a conduit for it. The requests of the Amidah until this point have empowered us to clarify and awaken our soul to what we truly want and what is truly worth wanting. With each request we have attuned our will to God’s will and thereby channeled His blessings into our lives. For instance, when we prayed for God’s healing to be manifest, we aligned our will with His will and the truth of His ever-present healing became more manifest in the world through us and our prayers. When prayed for redemption, we aligned our will with God’s will and the truth of His perpetual salvation became more manifest in the world through us and our prayers. By doing so, we have performed a service for God. Now therefore, we are able to say, “Take pleasure YHVH Eloheinu in Your nation Israel and their prayers.”