After this past year in Israel and for Jews around the world, the Days of Awe feel challenging for many of us. It can be hard to access the heart and headspace for prayer at the moment. There is so much to recall and recount, to question, to ask for, to be grateful for. 
 
Sometimes, what we want to pray is on the tips of our tongues, as we yearn to call out in tragedy, relief, gratitude, pain, reflection, or joy. Other times, we are stuck, struck mute, in shock, in horror, numb, or sad. All that we have experienced this year has left many of us reeling, on a roller coaster of emotion– history is unfolding impossibly fast, even as we also feel motionless, waiting, waiting, waiting: for the hostages to come home, for our soldiers to come home, for antisemitism to abate. Even for redemption, which has felt interminably slow in coming. 
 
Before you is a “machzor companion” for the High Holy Days and the Ten Days of Repentance. Print it out and bring it with you wherever you pray. Or reflect on the heartfelt prayers within at your leisure. Or hold it close, if you get stymied this season. 
 
In the spirit of the Az Nashir series, we present Az Nashir: Days of Awe. Included are techinot written in our mother tongue of English, in the style of techines written for hundreds of years by Jewish women to capture their most intimate conversations and dialogues with the Divine.  
 
These new prayers capture the essence of the climate we live in right now, our spiritual zeitgeist, ripped from the headlines of our world. Each one distills the moment, and calls out to the heavens from our present. 
 
We hope that you find inspiration and solace in these pages. No matter what you are thinking and feeling this Yamim Noraim, we are with you. An entire community of Jewish women in Israel and around the world are alongside you. 
 
May our prayers pierce the highest levels of the heavens – bringing healing, hope, and peace to us all in this year to come. May the hostages come home. May this war, the terror that led to it, and the antisemitism that was laid bare by it all  end, to be replaced by peace and restoration for Israel and the Jewish people. May we know only peace and the full redemption, speedily in our days.