Shacharit, Mincha and Maariv
The three daily Jewish services, and the fixed liturgy each one follows.
Traditional practice divides the day into three services: Shacharit in the morning, the longest, opening with psalms before the Shema and Amidah; Mincha in the afternoon, short enough to fit a work break; and Maariv after dark. Rabbinic sources credit the pattern to the patriarchs or to the Temple's daily offerings. How many of the three a person prays, and whether with a congregation, varies widely.
Traditional practice divides the day into three services. Shacharit in the morning is the longest, opening with psalms before the Shema and the Amidah. Mincha in the afternoon is short enough to fit into a work break. Maariv comes after dark, and is the one most often said alone.
Rabbinic sources credit the pattern either to the patriarchs or to the daily offerings of the Temple, and both explanations are old. How many of the three a person prays, and whether with a congregation or alone, varies enormously between communities and within them.
The order is fixed rather than improvised. What a person says at Shacharit on an ordinary Tuesday is substantially what was said in that community last Tuesday, and the prayer book is the reason: it is a script, and the freedom sits in what a person adds silently rather than in what is said aloud.
Does it have a text?
These services have a fully fixed text, and it is the one this site most conspicuously lacks. The liturgy lives in the siddur, and every modern prayer book is in copyright. The public-domain option is Singer's 1890 volume, which prints Hebrew facing English and has not been transcribed off the scan. What is held here from within these services is the Shema, in Hebrew and English.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Jewish
- The Shema — Less a petition than a declaration, and the prayer that bookends a Jewish day and a Jewish life.
- The Amidah — The standing prayer at the centre of every Jewish service.
- Kaddish — An Aramaic praise of God's name that marks the joints of every service, and that mourners recite.
- Berakhot — The short fixed blessings said over food, drink and ordinary acts.
- Jewish prayers of healing and memory — Mi Sheberach for the sick, and El Malei Rachamim for the dead.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.