"Hashem, open my lips, and let my mouth speak of Your praise."

Before we begin the Shemoneh Esrei, we offer a short entreaty to Hashem that He assist us in speaking words of prayer to Him.

Sefas Emes notes that the faculty of speech is not one a human being is born with. A small baby, from the moment of birth, is able to hear, feel and touch things. But he is not yet able to speak. It is only when the baby begins to mature that he learns to speak.

There is a lesson here, writes Sefas Emes. It is that speech is not something that man is automatically endowed with. It comes to us as we mature. And it is given to us in order that we utilize it in our service of Hashem.

Sefas Emes adds that the Talmud, in Sukkah 42, teaches that when a child begins to speak, his father ought to teach him a sentence of Torah. This sentence paves the way for the child to use his faculty of speech in this manner for the rest of his life.

Talk is not something trivial, to be thrown around at every opportunity. The ability to speak was given to us by Heaven for a specific purpose, and we are supposed to use it in a positive and constructive manner.

I once heard from my Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman zt"l, that in the parsha of Balak we are told that Bilaam's donkey spoke to him. This was a special miracle from Heaven. The Torah writes, "And Hashem opened the mouth of the donkey." Seforno comments that this means that Hashem gave the donkey the ability to speak--and in like manner, it is written, "Hashem, open my lips."

The Rosh Yeshiva commented on this: if we find that Hashem granted the gift of speech to a donkey, we certainly consider that to be a very great miracle. But the fact that each and every one of us is able to speak is something that we do not perceive as a miracle at all. We accept it matter-of-factly: it is just the way things are. Everyone is able to speak.

This is where we are mistaken. The donkey's speaking to Bilaam is described in the Torah as "Hashem opened the mouth of the donkey." So too with regard to our own ability to speak. We say to Hashem, "open my lips." We use the same expression that the Torah uses when it describes the speaking of the donkey--which was undoubtedly a very great miracle.

And if we recognize this, if we impress upon ourselves that speech is not something that comes automatically, but is a heaven- sent gift, then certainly we will do our utmost to use it in the best possible way. And so we open our Shemoneh Esrei in this manner. Before we begin to say anything to Hashem, we acknowledge that our ability to speak must be channeled into something meaningful. And we can only do this with the assistance of Heaven.

Copyright (c) 1997 by Rabbi Levi Langer

Courtesy of www.JewishAmerica.com