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Chapter Nine: | 467 466 | A New Light
Prayers for Holy Sleep way that a person wishes to go, he is led.” Therefore,
help me set aside time to meet with You every day, and
to have intent and to make my request.
Hashem Wants You to Pray
Prayer and all service of Hashem begin from this point.
Now that you understand that all that Hashem wants of you is to
set aside time to pray, I will present some passages of prayer that If, inspired by this chapter, you reduce your sleep by only ten
will sum up this chapter and help everyone pray every day. I have minutes a day, that is already worth everything. In 50 years that
divided the prayers as follows: prayers for the time of the work will add up to a profit of 3,000 hours! Just think what you can
of the will, and more specialized and focused prayers to be said accomplish with 3,000 hours—which is 125 days. to seek them, like people far away with no one to bring
before going to sleep. It is always possible to recite all of the prayers
before going to sleep. But since there are so many, I did not want
to burden the reader before sleep. The prayers to be recited before
going to sleep are more intense than those meant to be recited
at the time of the work of the will, because at the time of sleep a
person is truly in danger.
It is very important to underscore that although you may utilize
these prayers in the work of the will, in order to receive inspiration
and ideas for your own words, do not view them as a substitute
for your personal prayers in your own words. During the half hour
devoted to the work of the will, do not read prayers from a text,
but speak to Hashem in your own personal words that come from
the heart. And the main thing is to pray with a great deal of will.
Some of the following prayers are taken from Likutei Tefillot,
but most are personal prayers that were composed based upon
the teachings discussed in this chapter. These prayers sum up this
book, because they are a living model of the work of the will, a
living model of how to transform Torah learning into prayer, and
a model of how learning inspires prayer. And the prayers before
sleep provides a living model of Chapter Six: Cause a New Light
to Shine on Zion, which teach that when a person prays, he must
feel as though he is hanging from a precarious wall, suspended
between life and death, with the faith that Hashem wants to save
him.
Chapter Nine: | 463
Master of the universe, Master of everything, after all
that we have caused with our sins, destroying our Temple
and causing the true tzaddikim to pass away, help us from
now on so that we will at any rate get up every night at
exactly midnight, and break our hearts considerably with
a full measure of tears over our tremendous sins that
caused all of this, as a result of which we have been left
like fatherless orphans, like creatures lost with no one
them close, and with no one to stand at their side.
In Your compassion, help us get up every night exactly
at midnight and mourn the destruction of the Temple,
which was destroyed for our sins. In this way, may we
arouse Your compassion so that You will console us
and give us joy quickly, and remove the ashes from the
mourners of Zion, and replace them with splendor.
Do Not Despair
The last observation that I will make is about the point from
which we begin our work. Everything begins with encouraging
yourself. This is a book about will. It makes no difference what you
are going through and how little you may be succeeding in your
work—even if you repeatedly find yourself seized by sleep, if you
sleep many hours, or if you get up late. The main thing is the will.
Do not abandon your will, because the will is what Hashem wants
from you. The purpose of everything that you have read in this
chapter and in everything that you learn is not to have you break
down and view yourself as an inferior person. Rather, the point is
for you to know what the truth is, what to want, and how much to
want. You must know what Hashem desires of you, and then you
must desire that as well.
You may see how day after day the craving for sleep overcomes
you, that you do not get up on time. If you grow angry at yourself
and blame yourself, you are making a mistake. You must know that
this work constitutes the central struggle in your life, and that the