Shalom students!
Welcome to this new course, which will be a journey of discovery regarding our central prayer, the Shemoneh Esreh, or Amidah for weekdays.
In this introductory session, we will cover a few basic questions before we will subsequently (in the following sessions) dive in to the structure and text of the tefila itself:
(1) What constitutes a tefila from the standpoint of halacha, according to the Rambam (who alone among the major rishonim attempted to do this in a systematic way)?
(2) Is the Tefilat haAmidah our only tefila…?
(3) Why do we need a formal, written tefila at all?
(4) What is the acknowledged source of our Tefilat Shemoneh Esreh as we have it? And of its required timeframes?
The source material provided here contains the full text of the Rambam Hilchot Tefila Chapter 1. You are welcome to study it in full, hence it is here. For the purposes of this first class, we will actually only discuss a few of the paragraphs of the chapter.