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Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: “The ‘Shabbat’ within each day”

Kavvanah can be attained by inner effort.

The first step is the simple awareness that entering into prayer is, in fact, stepping into another kind of reality, in which a person undertakes the maximal effort to detach his mind from all those mundane matters with which he is usually surrounded.

Our sages have described the hour of prayer as the “Shabbat” within each day, a period of time set aside for sacred matters, during which a person leaves the sphere of his regular activities and turns his mind away from the matters that surround him constantly.

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz