The standing — the Amidah as choreography

The central prayer of every service is named for a posture and nothing else: the Amidah, ha-amidah — "the standing." Not for its words, not for its subject. For the fact that you are on your feet.

What surrounds it is a small, exactly specified choreography, and every piece of it is old and legal rather than mystical: three steps in to enter, feet together for the duration, four bows at fixed places, decomposed into knees, waist and straightening keyed to individual words, and three steps back to leave. Then, and only then, the Kabbalists laid a second reading over the top — Meir ibn Gabbai's Tola'at Ya'akov of 1507 is a commentary on exactly this, phrase by phrase. This app keeps the two layers apart on the page, because the choreography stands perfectly well without the second one and was performed for a thousand years before it.