Using "self-composed" prayers for people facing serious tzuros

I second what ItcheSrulik said.

As soon as you give it to someone else, it isn’t their personal prayer. You fail to mention, did any of these Rabbonim who know well suggest you publicize it? Did they even agree that you should attempt to publicize it? Ask any of Rav Stein Shelitas talmidim if he felt you should publicize your compositions, as heart-warming as they may be.

It doesn’t actually say that we don’t compose new prayers after the anshe knesses hagedola, but it’s a matter of logic. Prayer is a personal conversation with God. Rav Soloveichik called it a “du siach” from the yiddish familiar word for you. The anshe knesses hagedola included prophets. That was the only reason they were able to write a shmoneh esrei. A prophet knows how to talk to God, we don’t. You mention piyutim. THey are another story. The paytanim did not write something and then walk into shul, give a klop and say “we’re saying this now.” They wrote for themselves and for kirvas elokim. Then people slowly started using their compositions in davening — sometimes after they died. Even then, there were thousands of piyutim written by great people — including paytanim like Yehuda HaLevi and Elazar HaKalir — that never made it into the machzor. How many of you have ever heard “Kah Shimcha” by Yehudah Halevi?

Silent One: I think what you’re doing is very good, and there’s nothing wrong with it. That said, you’ll have some trouble convincing people (for one thing, I’m afraid many people don’t pray much outside of the required prayers!).

Reb Noson of Breslov, the main talmid of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, wrote Likutei Tefilot, a book of prayers he composed to put Rebbe Nachman’s teachings into the form of prayers (most of which has been translated). I must say it it a powerful work, and I feel very aroused spiritually by davening from it. He received much opposition to the work in his time, but it makes sense that people compose new prayers over time.

It is not the case that (as one commenter suggested) there is the daily prayer service instituted 2000 years ago, and then there is personal prayer in one’s own words, and nothing else. Davening with Likutei Tefilot, for example, enriches and supplements my own hitbodedut. Also, women in Eastern Europe a couple hundred years ago commonly recited special prayers in Yiddish for all kinds of things, from good children to more kabbalistic kinds of things.

If you come up with your own prayers and you like them and you get positive feedback from rabbis, great — then publish them on your webpage and try to convince people to use your prayers. Or, alternatively, you could ask people who don’t feel comfortable with your prayers to at least spend a couple minutes of spontaneous personal prayer. I believe you are right that if more people prayed for shidduchim or children, then it would happen!

The Chazon Ish spoke very positively about the importance of personal prayers outside of the required ones, as did many others such as the Chafetz Chaim, so I’m not surprised the Chazon Ish might have explicitly approved drafting new prayers. He himself drafted some new prayers, I believe, so why not other people too?

yytz: there are two kinds of prayer, ritual and personal. Ritual prayer was instituted by the anshei knesses hagedola — shmona esrei brachos al haseder. Personal prayer is everything else, whether you wrote them yourself or not. I don’t daven from likutei tefillos, but I do use Yehuda Haleivi’s poems among others. But those are just my way of enhancing my personal prayer as likutei tefillos does for you. We don’t write prayers for other people and say “you should daven like this.”