Getting to Eighteen: The Standardization of Jewish Prayer

The number of prayers does not come from the Torah, and the standard liturgy is not derived from the Torah, and there is no fixed time for prayer in the Torah.

Rather, the actual obligation is as follows: a person should pray and plead every day, speaking the praises of God, and then asking for anything one needs in the form of requests and pleas, and then give thanks to God for the good God has bestowed. Everyone according to their ability.

If one is accustomed to it, one should increase one's pleas and requests. If one has difficulty speaking, one need only speak as much as one can, whenever one needs to. So it is with the number of prayers - everyone does them in accordance with their ability; some pray once a day, and some pray many times a day. And all pray facing the place of the Temple, wherever they are.

And so it was since the days of Moses, until the time of Ezra.

When Israel was exiled, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar the Wicked, they intermingled with Persia and Greece and other nations, and they had children in foreign lands. And these children spoke hybrid languages and everyone spoke a different dialect. And when they had to speak, they could not express themselves clearly in one language, but instead some hodge-podge, as it says, “And their children spoke half in Ashdodite, and could not recognize Jewish speech, and spoke according to the language of each nation they were in.” (Nechemiah 13:24) And because of this, when one of them would pray, they would cut short their prayers for their needs, or their attempts to praise god in the Holy tongue. And it got to a point where Hebrew itself was getting mixed up with other languages. When Ezra and his court saw this – they arose and instituted the eighteen blessings in their order.

The first three were Praising God, and the final three were Thanks. And the middle were Requests for everything - major categories that covered all human needs, individual and communal.

This is so that they would be ready on everyone’s tongue, and could be learned quickly, and so the prayers of those who spoke poorly could still be as complete as the prayers of the most articulate people. And so they instituted all the blessings and the prayers in a fixed order, so that they would be on the tongues of all of Israel, and so that every blessing would be laid out clearly for those who spoke poorly.

One may not say anything less than these prayers, but one may say more. If a person wants to pray all day long, they certainly may. And any prayer that one adds will be like a voluntary offering. Therefore, one has to add something to the prayer itself, one does so in one of the middle prayers, to indicate that this is a voluntary prayer, not an obligation. But we do not add to or take away from the first three and the last three, because there must be no change to these.

In the days of Rabban Gamliel, there was a proliferation of heretical sects in Israel, and they would attack Israel and incite them to turn away from God. When Rabban Gamliel saw how overwhelming this phenomenon was, he and his court arose and instituted a blessing asking God to wipe out the heretics, and he fixed it into the prayers, so that it would be on everyone’s tongue. And so it was that the number of blessings rose to nineteen.