The Amidah
Also called Shemoneh Esrei, the Standing Prayer.
The standing prayer at the centre of every Jewish service, prayed quietly and then repeated aloud.
The Amidah is the core of each of the three daily services. Its other name, Shemoneh Esrei, means eighteen, though the weekday form long ago grew to nineteen blessings. It moves through praise, then petition, then thanks, and it is prayed standing and facing Jerusalem.
Each worshipper says it quietly, and in traditional congregations the leader then repeats it aloud. On Shabbat and festivals the weekday petitions give way to blessings about the day itself, so the prayer is shorter rather than longer on the days that are otherwise fullest.
It is the prayer most shaped by rite. The Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Nusach Sfard forms differ in wording and in the order of some blessings, and a text that presented one of them as the Amidah would misrepresent the others.
Why the words are not here
Checked at the sources rather than assumed. Only one of the three rites has Hebrew here that is both freely licensed and independently attested: the Sephardi text exists in two clean editions, while the Ashkenazi and Nusach Sfard texts are available only from a single 1981 edition under a Creative Commons licence. Publishing one properly sourced rite beside two that rest on a single licensed source, offered as three equal choices, would be the misrepresentation a rite picker is meant to prevent.
Every text on this site names the edition it came from and was checked against it twice. A prayer nobody can cite an edition for does not get printed here, however well known it is. The verification record lists what was held back and why, and how rights are established explains the test.
What we do hold
When people look for this
The moments this prayer is associated with. Each page carries cited guidance on how different traditions meet that moment.
Where it belongs
This page describes a prayer and, where we hold one, prints a named edition of it. It does not tell you whether to say it, or when. That judgment belongs to someone credentialed in the tradition, and nobody has signed anything here.