Amazon.com Reviews

Essential reading if you are exploring Jewish Prayer
By Dan Liben (Natick, MA)

Finally, the book on Jewish prayer that I have been waiting for someone to write. Comins brings to the table a collection of some of today’s most interesting Rabbis, Cantors, daveners and meditators, who share their experience with prayer. While the book touches upon theology, its real concern is the phenomenology of prayer: how does it work? How does it transform the pray-er? What various techniques and methods of prayer can I learn from people who are further along their prayer journey than I am?

Though these questions may sound ponderous, Comins has actually written a page-turner. His interviewees are candid and personal, and you really want to hear what they have to say. Comins challenges all of us who have ever been bored by stultifying services to stop blaming the clergy or the prayerbook, and to take responsibility for our own prayer lives. He urges Jews in the pews to stop thinking about the Siddur as a book to be read in the ordinary sense, but rather as a tool to be used, as part of a more fully embodied experience, in order to reach an expanded state of God-consciousness.

The how-to section near the end is phenomenal: practical techniques offered by masters of prayer that can be easily tested out and taken on as your own. This is the book that may finally wake Jews up to the possibility of prayer as a serious spiritual practice.

Best book I have read in years
By Jamie S. Korngold (Boulder, CO)

I love this book! Making Prayer Real is the best book I have read in years.

It’s like eating an Oreo cookie. (Or in my case a Newman’s Hint-of-Mint cookie.) Rabbi Comins commentary on its own, would have been fabulous. Dayeinu – enough. (The chocolate cookie.) And the other contributors’ voices alone, also would have been enough. (The creamy filling) But put the two together and you have a delicious, well written, inspiring, re-assuring piece of work.

I had no idea I shared the same thoughts about prayer as so many other Jewish people. We also differ, but that’s okay too. I am simply inspired and relieved.

This book rocks. You will read it in one sitting. Or maybe two. I had to get up in the middle to get more cookies and refill my milk glass.

-Rabbi Jamie Korngold, The Adventure Rabbi and author of God in the Wilderness: Rediscovering the Spirituality of the Great Outdoors with the Adventure Rabbi