[Avodah] How Fast Do You Daven

[Akiva Miller]

.
>From R' Micha Berger:

> R' Barry Kornblau posted this chart on Facebook.
> http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/faxes/daveningSpeedChart.jpg
> ...
> You might want to see where you stand; could help motivate
> slowing down enough to think. At least it's been of help for
> me for the past day or two.

If it has helped you, that is great, and I applaud it. But my first
reaction is that there are many people who would find ways to quibble with
R' Kornblau's methodology.

For such people, I have an alternate suggestion: An individual should
create an audio recording of him/herself, reciting some tefila in his usual
way. The person then listens to that recording, and judges for himself
whether or not he actually said the words well enough.

I got this idea a number of years ago, when I suddenly noticed some odd
things about my own davening. At one point, I realized that my lips were
moving, but no sound at all was coming out. And when I say "no sound", I
don't mean that the whisper was so quiet that I couldn't hear myself; I
mean that my breathing had paused, and no sound of any kind was coming out.
On another occasion, I noticed (again while my lips were moving) that my
throat was making a noise that I could describe only as a low buzz,
sounding nothing like any human language that I know of. [And another time,
the words were coming out fine, but I noticed that my eyes were progressing
along an entirely different page. But that's a whole 'nother problem, for a
whole 'nother thread.]

Practical implementation of this plan is not difficult nowadays. Many
smartphones have a Voice Recorder which works perfectly for this. Simply
set it up, turn it on, hold it close enough to pick up your voice, and
daven exactly as you usually do. Another option is to dial an unattended
telephone, and let the answering machine record your voice.

In my opinion this procedure is far too distracting to do during Shmoneh
Esreh, but Al Hamichyah and Aleinu would work just as well. The important
thing is to make a recording that is a good representation of what you
usually do. And then listen to that recording and remind yourself that
although Hashem knows what's in our hearts, He also wants to hear the words.

Of course, there will be some people who, for the purposes of this
experiment, will deliberately enunciate the words just a bit better than
usual, to help the recording come out well. Such people don't really need
to listen to the recording afterwards; they already have their answer.

Akiva Miller
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