My Soul Yearns for Love
Nafshi holat ahavahtecha, ana elna refa na la
My soul yearns for your love, please God, heal her
Every human act is either an expression or a request for love. This line from Yedid Nefesh, which Jeff Roth translates as my soul yearns for your love, please God, heal her is introduced with the kavanah (intention) that we may really feel both the yearning to give and express love as well as the longing to receive love.
The healing that’s implied [in this prayer] is not that the yearning should stop. The healing that’s implied is heal this yearning by helping us to experience this love. The yearning should continue. It’s what pulls us to search for this love.
The healing is bringing our awareness and our consciousness to this yearning and seeing that it is OK to have this. When we see it from this more conscious place we feel more connected.
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I have just discovered your website. A therapist and I have been working together and decided that finding Jewish prayers/meditations of compassion would be good for me. I am so incredibly grateful to have discovered your website and have only begun with this chant so far but feel a lovely resonance with it and I thank you all so much for making this available on-line. Makes me have a new (and already enormous) appreciation of the good that can be transmitted through the internet and its potential to establish, create, strengthen connections/giving/receiving.