This is what Rabbi Elazar would pray and say when he fasted, “It is revealed and known before You, Hashem, my Elohim and the Elohim of my fathers, that I have offered up before You my fat and blood, and I have seethed them with the heat of the weakness of my body” (The Zohar, Shemot: Verse 368).

There is a big difference whether I read these words from the prayer book or something happens inside of me and I explode from within in my yearning for the Creator with such words.

These feelings were created inside me, formed into words and phrases. I may not even know this language. I do not know how it happens, but this is the result of my efforts to make my desires similar to the light and connect them with the light.

Light and desires produce this reaction in the soul, they are recognized in my brain, the brain transmits instructions to the organs of speech, and I pronounce them without knowing where these words came from!

This is the way the real prayer should be, when everything comes from within, when from the connection of lights and Kelim, from the deepest foundations of creation, light and desire, the filling of desire with light, the whole TANTA (complete Kli – Taamim, Nekudot, Tagin, Otiot) is gradually built until they are expressed by the speech apparatus.

It is clear that Rabbi Elazar did not read this prayer according to the prayer book, but while he was in this state, about which he spoke to the Creator.

Before the Second Temple was ruined, the people of Israel were in connection with the Creator, in the qualities of bestowal and love, and their prayer was the feeling in their heart—desire. It is said: “What is prayer? The work in the heart.”

But the sages of the Great Assembly (Knesset HaGadol), knowing about the imminent fall into egoism, meaning the concealment of the Creator from everyone, compiled a collection of prayers for us, states to which a person must come.

They called it “Siddur“—the order of spiritual states that we must go through within ourselves, in our heart (desire).

But since we are not capable of such a thing in times of exile, the absence of connection with the light, with the Creator, when the upper force is concealed, we mechanically read the words from the prayer book, and someone may be trying to imagine what it would mean in spirituality.

Only the light, when we are studying Kabbalah, will evoke in us feelings, thoughts, sensations, words, and phrases of our prayer as work in the heart, and not in the speech apparatus.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/22/10, The Book of Zohar, Shemot (Exodus)

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