Moïse Maïmonide
1138-1204 12th century
Attention, without which the right words are still only words.
Who was Moïse Maïmonide?
Born in Córdoba, he was thirteen when the Almohad persecution drove his family onto the roads of Spain and Morocco, before they settled in Fustat, near Cairo. The death of his brother David, drowned in the Indian Ocean with the family's fortune, left him ill with grief for a year and made him live by medicine. He spent his days on horseback between the vizier's court and the sick, and wrote at night. His codes of Jewish law give pages to what makes a prayer a prayer, or fails to.
In their own words
A prayer without attention is not a prayer. Whoever has prayed without attention must pray again, with attention.
What is attention? That a man empty his heart of every other thought and see himself standing before the Presence.
The one who serves out of love occupies himself with the Torah and the commandments expecting nothing from the world, neither fear of harm nor hope of inheritance: he does what is true because it is true.