A Prayer For the Last Page

I finished writing in a journal & felt the need to say a prayer

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

This post contains footnotes because the additional explanations seemed to detract from the piece.

This morning I did my meditation and journal practices.

This is the journal I just finished.

As I arrived at the last page of my journal¹, I felt a strong need to say a prayer to mark that final page, a symbolic closing of one book before opening another, the end of one cycle and the beginning of another.

I googled “Jewish prayer for ending” and related terms. Not much came up. Judaism is big on celebrating cycles, but “life cycles,” “cycles in Judaism,” and other search terms related to “cycles” seemed too broad.

I did find Hadran Alach. On Ohr Somayach’s website, Rabbi Reuven Lauffer explains²,

There is a beautiful custom that when a person finishes an entire tractate of the Talmud he recites a series of prayers that are generically referred to as Hadran.

Lauffer further shares,

The first section begins with the words Hadran Alach, which, according to most opinions, is Aramaic for “we…