Prayer is to the human spirit. What exercise is to the human body?

I try to do my 10,000 steps a day. I don't always

succeed, but I feel bad when I don't because I know that with my sedentary lifestyle, if I don't

exercise, all sorts of things will go wrong. I'll put on weight. My muscles will grow weak. My blood pressure will rise

and my life expectancy will decline. I'll lose years from my life and life from my years.

And yes, 10,000 steps on a treadmill can sometimes be pretty boring. But you do it because you know what will happen if you

don't.

And the same is true of prayer.

It's just that we don't have the same kind of precise measurement for the spirit that we do

for the body.

It's not easy to quantify the feelings of happiness, fulfillment, meaning, gratitude, pleasure, delight,

joy, but they make a difference. In fact, they make all the difference to the sense of

blessedness of a life well lived. And we now know, thanks to the research of people like

Martin Seligman, Edina, Sonia

Liebomersky and Talben Shahar, that happiness, the flourishing of the human spirit,

has an effect on life expectancy and on health.

It strengthens the immune system.

It's correlated with success in education, career and

relationships. It turns us outward and makes us less likely to suffer from loneliness and despair.

It's just that we seem to have forgotten that prayer is to the spirit, what physical exercise is to the body.

Meditation, yes, mindfulness certainly. They're the fashionable things and surely there's nothing wrong with them.

Jewish prayer, when it's done the right way, is a form of meditation and mindfulness.

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