it, ‘Welcome home’.”
Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk once asked: “Why does it say in the Shema, ‘These words shall be on your heart'? Should it not say, ‘These words shall be in your heart'? The answer is that the heart is not always open. Therefore we should lay these words on our heart, so that when it opens, they will be there, ready to enter.”
Prayer requires practice. That is implicit in defining prayer as avodah she-be-lev, “service of the heart”. The word avodah, service, also means hard work, labour, strenuous activity. We have to work at prayer. But there are also times when the most inarticulate prayer, said from the heart, pierces the heavens. What matters is seriousness and honesty. “GOD is close to all who call on Him – to all who call on Him in truth.”
11. JACOB’S LADDER
PRAYER IS A JOURNEY THAT HAS BEEN described in many ways. According to the mystics, it is a journey through the four levels of being – Action, Formation, Creation and Emanation. Rabbi Jacob Emden worked out an elaborate scheme in which the prayers represent a movement from the outer courtyards to the Holy of the Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem. According to everyone, the stages of prayer constitute an ascent and descent, reaching their highest level in the middle, in the Shema and Amidah.
The metaphor that, to me, captures the spirit of prayer more than any other is Jacob’s dream in which, alone at night, fleeing danger, far from home, he saw a ladder stretching from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending. He woke and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of GOD; this is the gate to heaven” (Genesis 28:10–17).
Our Sages said that “this place” was Jerusalem. That is midrashic truth. But there is another meaning, the plain one, no less transfiguring. The verb the Torah uses, vayifgah, means “to happen upon, as if by chance”. “This place” was any place. Any place, any time, even the dark of a lonely night, can be a place and time for prayer. If we have the strength to dream and then, awakening, refuse to let go of the dream, then here, now, where I stand, can be the gate to heaven.
Prayer is a ladder and we are the angels. If there is one theme sounded throughout the prayers, it is creation-revelation-redemption, or ascent-summit-descent. In the Verses of Praise, we climb from earth to heaven by meditating on creation. Like a Turner or Monet landscape, the psalms let us see the universe bathed in light, but this light is not the light of beauty but of holiness; the light the Sages say GOD made on the first day and “hid for the righteous in the life to come”. Through some of the most magnificent poetry ever written, we see the world as GOD’S masterpiece, suffused with His radiance, until we reach a crescendo in Psalm 150 with its thirteen-fold repetition of “Praise” in a mere thirty-seven words.
By the time we reach Bar’chu and the blessings of the Shema we have neared the summit. Now we are in heaven with the angels. We have reached revelation. The Divine presence is close, almost tangible. We speak of love in one of the most hauntingly beautiful of blessings, “Great love” with its striking phrase: “Our Father, merciful Father, the Merciful, have mercy on us”. Now comes the great declaration of faith at the heart of prayer, the Shema with its passionate profession of the unity of GOD and the highest of all expressions of love, “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” Ending with a reference to the exodus, the Shema gives way to the Emet blessing with its emphasis on redemption, the exodus and the division of the sea. Then comes the Amidah, the supreme height of prayer. Three traditions fuse at this point: the silent Amidah said by individuals, reminding us of prophetic prayer; the Leader’s repetition representing priestly worship and prayer as sacrifice; and then the Kedushah, prayer as a mystical experience.
From here, prayer begins its descent. First comes Tachanun in which we speak privately and intimately to the King. At this point, with a mixture of anguish and plea, we speak not of GOD’S love for Israel but of Israel’s defiant love of GOD: “Yet despite all this we did not forget You; please do not forget us” There is a direct reference back to the Shema: “Guardian of Israel, guard the remnant of Israel, and let not Israel perish who declare: Shema Yisrael”.
Then comes Ashrei and the subsequent passages, similar to the Verses of Praise but this time with redemption, not creation, as their theme. The key verse is “A redeemer will come to Zion”. The section closes with a prayer that we may become agents of redemption as we re-engage with the world (“May it be Your will … that we keep Your laws in this world”). We are now back on earth, the service complete except for Aleinu, Kaddish and the Psalm of the Day. We are ready to re-enter life and its challenges.
What has prayer achieved? If we have truly prayed, we now know that the world did not materialise by chance. A single guiding will directed its apparent randomness. We know too that this will did not end there, but remains intimately involved with the universe, which He renews daily, and with humanity over whose destinies He presides. We have climbed the high ladder and have seen, if only dimly, how small some of our worries are. Our emotional landscape has been expanded. We have given voice to a whole range of emotions: thanks, praise, love, awe, guilt, repentance, remembrance, hope. As we leave the synagogue for the world outside, we now know that we are not alone; that GOD is with us; that we need not fear failure, for GOD forgives; that our hopes are not vain; that we are here for a purpose and there is work to do.
We are not the same after we have stood in the Divine presence as we were before. We have been transformed. We see the world in a different light. Perhaps we radiate a different light. We have spoken and listened to GOD. We have aligned ourselves with the moral energies of the universe. We have become, in Lurianic terminology, vessels for GOD’S blessing. We are changed by prayer.
12. IS PRAYER ANSWERED?
IS PRAYER ANSWERED? IF GOD IS CHANGEless, how can we change Him by what we say? Even discounting this, why do we need to articulate our requests? Surely GOD, who sees the heart, knows our wishes even before we do, without our having to put them into words. What we wish to happen is either right or wrong in the eyes of GOD. If it is right, GOD will bring it about even if we do not pray. If it is wrong, GOD will not bring it about even if we do. So why pray?
The classic Jewish answer is simple but profound. Without a vessel to contain a blessing, there can be no blessing. If we have no receptacle to catch the rain, the rain may fall, but we will have none to drink. If we have no radio receiver, the sound waves will flow, but we will be unable to convert them into sound. GOD’S blessings flow continuously, but unless we make ourselves into a vessel for them, they will flow elsewhere. Prayer is the act of turning ourselves into a vehicle for the Divine.
Speaking from personal experience, and from many encounters with people for whom prayer was a lifeline, I know that our prayers are answered: not always in the way we expected, not always as quickly as we hoped, but prayer is never in vain. Sometimes the answer is No. If granting a request would do us or others harm, GOD will not grant it. But No is also an answer, and when GOD decides that something I have prayed for should not come to pass, then I pray for the wisdom to understand why. That too is part of spiritual growth: to accept graciously what we cannot or should not change. Nor is prayer a substitute for human effort: on the contrary, prayer is one of the most powerful sources of energy for human effort. GOD gives us the strength to achieve what we need to achieve, and to do what we were placed on earth to do.
Prayer changes the world because it changes us. At its height, it is a profoundly transformative experience. If we have truly prayed, we come in the course of time to know that the world was made, and we were made, for a purpose; that GOD, though immeasurably vast, is also intensely close; that “though my father and mother may reject
