Causality: D. Prayer for a Miracle (Column 463)
In the previous three columns I argued that causal relations have three components: the temporal, the logical, and the physical. I then noted the difficulty of treating the physical component formally (symbolically). In the last column I concluded that the logical component of the cause defines the cause as a sufficient (and not necessary) condition for the effect. One implication of this conclusion concerned God’s involvement in the world. I argued that if the laws of nature are a sufficient condition, then there is no divine involvement within nature. In principle, divine involvement in the world could still occur (though in my personal view it likely does not), but it would always be as a departure from nature.
This, of course, raises the question of prayer and its effectiveness. If we conclude that God is not involved in the world, then there is no point in asking Him for anything. That is the question of effectiveness, an empirical question, but I have discussed it more than once in the past, and therefore I will not enter into it here. In this column I wish to discuss a halakhic question: even if we assume that He is involved in the world, since we have seen that such involvement entails departing from nature, is it prohibited to ask for such involvement? At first glance this halakhic question seems very surprising and quite implausible. The Talmud and the halakhic authorities are full of permission and even obligation to ask God for our needs, in prayer and otherwise. How can one say that this is prohibited? This question has already been mentioned here several times (see, for example, here, here, here and here), but as far as I recall it has yet to receive its own dedicated place. Along the way I will occasionally remark on the factual plane, insofar as it arises.
The sugya of praying about the past
The Mishnah in Berakhot 9:3 (Berakhot 54a) states:
And one who cries out about the past—this is a vain prayer. If his wife was pregnant and he says, “May it be His will that my wife bear a male,” this is a vain prayer. If he was on the road and heard a scream in the city and says, “May it be His will that this not be from my house,” this is a vain prayer.
A person who prays that the fetus in his wife’s womb be male—this is a vain prayer. And likewise one who prays about an event that has already happened. The conclusion is that a prayer about an event that has already happened (a prayer about the past) is a vain prayer. From the language of the Mishnah one might understand that there is no prohibition, only that it is pointless and ineffective (that is the meaning of “vain”). If this is the Mishnah’s meaning, then the Mishnah is essentially saying that God does not depart from nature (we shall see below that a prayer about the past is nothing but a prayer for a miracle), i.e., He is not involved in the world (for, as we have seen, any involvement of His is a departure from nature), and therefore such requests are in vain. It is no wonder, then, that the halakhic authorities commonly explain that the Mishnah intends to say that there is a prohibition (see, for example, at the end of the thread here)[1]. The reason for the prohibition is unclear. Some wished to say that it diminishes our merits in the World to Come, or that this is an improper use of God—that is, attempting to cause Him to act against His policy. Perhaps the prohibition stems from a concern about a negative impact on believers if the prayer is not answered (for God does not obligate Himself to perform miracles and depart from nature). For our purposes here it suffices that there is a prohibition.
And behold, the Gemara there (60a) explains:
If his wife was pregnant and he said, “May it be His will that she bear…,” this is a vain prayer and mercy will not avail.
The Gemara explains that since the woman is already pregnant, the prayer is in vain, and even adds that it does not help (“it is ineffective”). Here we already have a factual assertion that what has already occurred cannot be changed, beyond the halakhic prohibition. Perhaps these two statements depend on each other: such a request does not help, and therefore it is also prohibited to make it.
Now the Gemara raises a difficulty from precedents where people did pray about the past:
Rav Yosef challenged: “And afterwards she bore a daughter, and she called her name Dinah.” What is “and afterwards”? Rav said: After Leah judged herself and said: “Twelve tribes are destined to come forth from Jacob; six have come from me and four from the maidservants—behold ten. If this one is a male, my sister Rachel will not be like one of the maidservants.” Immediately it was turned into a female, as it is said: “And she called her name Dinah.”
It appears that prayer can indeed change reality.
The Gemara there gives two answers. The first:
We do not cite miraculous occurrences.
There it was a miracle, and we are dealing with the normal course of nature. The commentators explain that our sugya is not dealing with prayer for a miracle. From this answer it follows that a miracle can occur; it is merely prohibited to pray for it. Moreover, from the wording of this answer it is quite clear that there is a prohibition on such prayer (and not merely that it is ineffective, since in practice it can be effective)[2]. Indeed, in the Jerusalem Talmud (Ta’anit 3) and in the halakhic authorities it is stated that it is prohibited to pray for a miracle, and such a prayer is like a vain prayer.
However, several commentators have noted that it follows from here that perfectly righteous individuals like Leah may also request a miracle (see, for example, Gevurat Ari to Ta’anit 19). But it is worth noting that such a leniency is not brought by the halakhic authorities (Rambam and the Shulchan Aruch and their commentaries). Therefore, even if in your view there are among us righteous people like our mother Leah, the authorities hold that there are not, and thus, in their opinion, this leniency, even if it exists, is irrelevant in practice. Accordingly, from here on I will ignore the question of the righteous, while asking forgiveness from all dear readers who belong to that group.
The second answer in the Gemara there:
And if you wish, say: Leah’s case was within forty days, as it was taught: During the first three days a person should pray that it not putrefy; from three to forty [days] he should pray that it be male; from forty days to three months he should pray that it not be a sandal; from three months to six he should pray that it not be a miscarriage; from six to nine he should pray that it come out in peace.
Here it seems the Gemara already assumes that even the righteous cannot request a change to an existing reality, but that up to forty days the sex of the embryo has not yet been determined. Moreover, the Gemara says that at every stage of pregnancy one can pray for what has not yet been determined.
This answer is the one brought by the halakhic authorities, which strengthens my conclusion above that the leniency for the righteous is irrelevant in practice. Perhaps this means that God does not perform such miracles even for the righteous, since His policy is not to intervene. This is not a question of the person’s level of merit (whether I “deserve” such intervention), in which case there would be room to distinguish between the righteous and ordinary people, but rather a divine policy (He wishes to run His world by way of nature). But as noted, here our concern is the halakhic question (whether such prayer is permitted), so I will not enter the factual question (whether God is involved in the world).
The Gemara there continues, clarifying how a situation can exist in which the matter has not yet been determined at that stage of pregnancy:
And will prayer help? But did not Rav Yitzḥak son of Rav Ami say: If the man emits seed first, she bears a female; if the woman emits seed first, she bears a male, as it is said: “A woman who conceives and bears a male.” With what are we dealing here? With a case where both emitted simultaneously.
Apparently, the sex of the newborn is determined already at conception and not at forty days. The Gemara answers that the case is where both partners emitted seed at the same time, and in such a case the sex is not determined at conception but at forty days. True, we do not know who emitted first, and thus we have no way to know in a specific case whether the sex of the fetus is still open. But it suffices that such a possibility exists to reject the claim that it is a vain prayer. In a case of doubt one may pray, and even that only up to forty days, for after that the sex is already fixed.
The halakhic authorities conclude that one should not pray for something miraculous, such as changing a female to a male or vice versa. A prayer to change reality is a vain prayer. Thus rules the Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chayim §230:1):
One who prays about what has already occurred—for example, he entered a city and heard a scream in the city and said: “May it be [His] will that this scream not be from my house”; or his wife was pregnant more than forty days and he said: “May it be [His] will that my wife bear a male”—this is a vain prayer. Rather, a person should pray about what is yet to come and give thanks for what has passed…
For the past one may give thanks but not pray. Prayer is only for the future, i.e., for what has not yet occurred. One must not pray for a departure from nature.[3] As noted, he brings as normative law only the Gemara’s second answer, as above.
Perhaps you wonder why I shifted here from prayer about the past to prayer to change reality, and essentially to prayer for a miracle. These are not identical expressions, but substantively there is no difference between them. I already noted that the halakhic authorities (following the Yerushalmi in Ta’anit) state that one must not pray for a miracle, and not only about the past. I will sharpen this by removing from the table two distinctions likely to be raised here: the distinction between an overt miracle and a hidden miracle, and the distinction between past and future.
Is there a distinction between praying for an overt miracle and praying for a hidden miracle?
There is a tendency to think that the prohibition applies only to praying for an overt miracle, but not for a hidden miracle. What is the difference? Perhaps because we do not want people to be disappointed and lose their faith if, in the end, a miracle does not occur. With a hidden miracle no one knows whether a miracle occurred or not. Of course, there is the other side of the coin: if in the end a hidden miracle does occur, then there is no risk that people will deny it and attribute it to nature, for the same reason—one cannot know whether it occurred. Believers will remain believers and deniers will remain deniers. In short, according to this thesis, divine involvement or an answer to prayer is a thesis not subject to refutation or confirmation. The moment it is subject to refutation or confirmation, it is prohibited to deploy it. Convenient enough, no?
One might attempt to infer this from the very sugya in Berakhot. The Gemara there speaks of one who was on the road and prays about a disaster that has already occurred, asking that it not be from his household. One may wonder why it speaks of someone on the road, rather than of one who already saw that his family members died and asks that they come back to life. Seemingly, this is a difference between a hidden and an overt miracle. The novelty is that even if he is on the road, since the matter is public and others have already seen what happened, this would be an overt miracle, and one may not pray for it. This could also explain the difference between the righteous and ordinary people: the righteous are worthy of a miracle and will not be disappointed if it does not occur. But as noted, this distinction is not ruled as law.
Moreover, a closer look at the sugya itself shows that this distinction is incorrect. The second example in the Mishnah is praying about a fetus in the mother’s womb. When I ask to change the sex of the fetus after one hundred days (by then it is certainly a vain prayer), even if God were to perform a miracle and change the fetus’s sex from female to male, it would be a hidden miracle, for all this occurs in the womb. As is known, in that era there was no ultrasound (and at fifty days, to my knowledge, even ultrasound does not yet reveal the sex). So why is the prayer deemed a vain prayer? From here we have evidence that the prohibition also applies to praying for a hidden miracle. So long as it entails a departure from nature, one may not request it.
Note that, in principle, a surgeon can (or will be able to in the future) perform in-utero surgery to change the sex of the fetus, and in that case it would be a change within the framework of nature and science. I assume that most halakhic authorities would not say that such an operation is prohibited because it interferes with nature. It is no greater an interference than curing cancer or any other disease (as is known, the physician has been given permission to heal).[4] And is it conceivable that one may not ask God to do something that a human surgeon can do? The answer is yes: divine involvement, unlike an operation performed by a human being, is a departure from nature. One must not ask God to interfere with nature, even in something a human being can do.
Is there a distinction between praying about the past and praying about the future?
I have heard some argue that one may request miracles, but not miracles that change the past. But this too does not withstand the facts. I request that God change the sex of the fetus from now on (not retroactively and not retroactive-from-now-on). This is not a request to change the past. For all I care, let the fetus have been formed as female, and now God will change its sex to male. As was said: “The past is gone, the future not yet, and the present is as the blink of an eye—whence worry?!” So why is this prohibited? The conclusion is that even if I request a change to the present or the future, so long as the future depends on the past and has already been set by it, this is a vain prayer.
Conclusion of the sugya
The conclusion that emerges from our discussion thus far: any request of God to change reality—whether in the past or in the future (in a case where the future has already been determined by the past)—is a vain prayer. We have also seen that there is no difference between an overt change of reality and a hidden change. Any request for divine involvement that departs from nature is a vain prayer.
When is the sex of the fetus determined?
I hold the heretical and progressive view (this old communist expression has enjoyed a revival and become a pejorative of late) that we now possess scientific knowledge that the Sages did not have. For example, with respect to the sex of the newborn, science today knows that it is determined at the moment the sperm meets the egg. Here is a passage from the infomed site:
The sex of the newborn is determined the moment the sperm meets the egg. If the sperm carries a Y chromosome, a boy will be born; if it carries an X chromosome, a girl will be born…
The natures of the sperm and egg determine the sex that will result from their meeting.[5] If so, the Gemara’s assumption that the sex of the newborn remains an open question until forty days after conception is false. The sex is fixed from the beginning of the pregnancy.
Halakhic ramifications
Does this change the law? Very likely yes. Once this is the knowledge we possess, the prohibition to pray about the sex of the fetus applies from the moment the sperm meets the egg. It seems that today such a prayer would be permitted only before intercourse.
But if we continue in that line of thought, we will find that, in fact, even before intercourse it is a vain prayer. In truth, the entire natural causal chain is deterministic, and each stage is determined by the preceding stages. Even the meeting of sperm and egg is a natural event and is governed by the laws of nature and circumstances. What determines which sperm and which egg meet is a very complex process that cannot be predicted, but it is still a deterministic process. Even the decision about the time of intercourse between father and mother, or even the choice of spouse—which are, of course, the primary influences on the identity of the sperm and egg that will participate in fertilization—are determined by a combination of the laws of nature and human choices.
Note that this description is a corollary of the picture presented in the previous column, according to which circumstances and the laws of nature (and now I will add: human choices) are a sufficient condition for everything that happens in the world. According to the conclusion of the sugya in Berakhot, in effect one cannot pray for anything that happens in the world. There is nothing that is not fixed by the laws of nature, and any divine involvement that does not depart from nature does not exist. If there is a prohibition to pray for a departure from nature, then there remains no place for prayer at all.
Note: I have not addressed here at all my view that nowadays God is not involved in the world. That is a different claim (on the factual plane), and my words here stand independently of it. Even if He is involved in every step we take, still, from our sugya it emerges that there is a halakhic prohibition to request it. Of course, if you assume that the sugya also states as a fact that He does not depart from nature (not that He cannot, but that this is His policy) and therefore there is no point in requesting it, and not merely that it prohibits praying for it, then the conclusion remains the same: both prohibited and pointless to pray for anything. But such an interpretation (which is stated almost explicitly in the sugya: “it does not avail”) turns the Sages into heretics like me, so for the sake of our discussion here I will not assume it. Even if we assume that God is involved, there is still a prohibition to ask Him for it.
Two kinds of randomness
To understand this better, I must sharpen a point that many tend to ignore (it was laid out well in column 326). We habitually treat various events in the world as if they were random: tossing a coin or a die, a chance meeting on the street, and the like. But these have nothing to do with randomness in the essential sense. A coin toss is a completely deterministic mechanical process, and if I knew the initial conditions (the circumstances)—namely, air density, the die’s exact shape, the initial velocity (magnitude and direction)—I could tell you how it will land. This is a calculation using the laws of Newtonian mechanics, elementary physics. Our inability to do so stems from the practical complexity of the calculation and the strong sensitivity of the outcome to initial conditions. But that is only a technical difficulty. In principle, in all such cases the circumstances and the laws of nature uniquely determine the outcome.
All the cases you normally regard as random (perhaps excepting quantum theory, which is irrelevant at these scales) are of this kind. They are all deterministic, and we use probabilistic tools only due to a technical difficulty. So it is with all events in the world known to us, and therefore all are subject to deterministic causality. This means that in our world everything that happens is the product of prior circumstances and the laws of nature. A chance encounter between a lion and a monkey, a particular weather pattern prevailing in a given region, the mood of human beings, and more—all these are products of the laws of nature and the circumstances that constitute a sufficient condition for them. Therefore, any divine involvement that would produce a different result (different weather, a different mood, a different encounter, and so on) is a departure from the laws of nature. Hence, a request that God intervene in something in the world is a departure from the laws of nature. The expression “a request for divine involvement without departing from nature” is an empty oxymoron. This holds for determining the sex of the newborn, a house fire, a dog’s attack on a baby, a pandemic, a tsunami, cancer or its cure, and any other event you can think of. There may be complexity, but the processes are deterministic, and involvement in them is a departure from the laws of nature. So what, in fact, is there to pray for? It seems: nothing.
And what about human choice?
I noted above that beyond the laws of nature and natural circumstances there is another factor influencing events in the world: human choice. Could divine involvement not enter via influencing human choice? Our decision whether, when, and with whom to have intercourse is the result of our free will, and therefore perhaps one could pray that God direct it so that the sperm and egg that meet will produce a male or female, as we desire.
To this I say two things: First, even if that is correct, prayer about the sex of the newborn would retreat much further back—before we even decided when to have intercourse. Certainly not after forty days from conception. Beyond this, as I will now explain, in my understanding even such involvement is, in a sense, a departure from nature.
The Sages say: “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven,” meaning that everything is done by God except for our deeds. If so, precisely in human actions He is not expected to intervene. In my view this is probably not the meaning of that dictum, since natural processes are “in the hands of Heaven” only in the sense that they are not in our hands but in the hands of the laws of nature (which themselves, of course, were created by God). What is in our hands are decisions pertaining to fear of Heaven—that is, decisions with moral significance. These are entrusted to us and our free choice. In any case, our actions certainly are not in Heaven’s hands, nor in the hands of the laws of nature. That dictum indeed rejects the deterministic claim that the laws of nature determine our choices and decisions.
Therefore, as I have been asked more than once (mainly by Oren, the site’s editor—see, for example, here and also here), one may wonder whether God might be involved in the world by influencing our choices, human beings. If these are not deterministic processes, then, ostensibly, divine involvement that does not depart from the laws of nature could occur there. According to this proposal, our prayer about the sex of the fetus, or about anything else, could be answered by divine intervention in the decisions of the human beings involved in the events—for example, decisions about whom to marry, when to have intercourse, and so on. This would be involvement that does not depart from nature (more precisely: the events themselves are not part of nature, and therefore my arguments here do not preclude divine involvement in them).
However, even regarding such human decisions there are only two possibilities: 1) They were made not out of moral considerations but simply because both partners felt like having intercourse on that day. In that case it is a natural event with natural causes. The human body is also part of the physical world. Divine involvement in such a process is certainly a departure from the laws of nature. 2) They were made out of moral considerations (choosing that particular spouse or that particular time for intercourse). But if so, then again it is unlikely that God would intervene, for such decisions are precisely entrusted to us and our free choice (“Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven”). In other words, just as His policy is not to intervene in the workings of nature and its laws, so too He refrains from intervening in our free choices. Just as He refrains from an intervention that contradicts natural processes, He refrains from an intervention that contradicts free choice.[6] Put differently: it is implausible to interpret my prayer as asking God to take away my choice of when to have intercourse. And even if the intent is not that He take away my choice but that this act is not a choice, and I am asking that God direct it to the right moment—this too is involvement that departs from the laws of nature, for were it not for the involvement, a particular moment would have been chosen by virtue of the laws of nature (recall that the human being is part of nature).
So what did the Gemara have in mind?
The conclusion is that, according to the sugya in Berakhot, there is no permission to pray for anything. Every event that occurs here is either a natural event with sufficient natural causes or a voluntary event entrusted to human free choice (which is the sufficient condition for it). Now the question arises: if this is indeed the conclusion of the sugya, what did the Sages think? They surely spoke of permitted requests in prayer. If every involvement is a departure from nature, and asking for a departure from nature is prohibited, then in what cases may one request anything? What did the Sages themselves mean when they spoke of requests to God? For example, the sugya rules that a request to change the sex of the fetus before forty days from conception is certainly permitted halakhically.
My claim is that the Sages erred in understanding natural reality (they lacked scientific knowledge). They thought there are open questions in nature, i.e., situations where circumstances do not dictate the outcome. Such “margins” mean that, given circumstances X, at least two different outcomes—Y and Z—can develop. For example, under circumstances prevailing before forty days (X), the newborn’s sex can be male (Y) or female (Z). But it turns out they were mistaken about this. According to current scientific knowledge, there are no such open states; i.e., there are no margins in nature.
Halakhic analysis: practical conclusion
The assumption is that the Talmud has the authority to determine halakhah and we do not dispute it. What, then, should we learn from the sugya in Berakhot? As noted, there are two claims in it: 1) A factual-scientific claim: there are margins in nature. 2) A halakhic-normative claim: it is prohibited to pray for involvement that departs from nature (i.e., to ask to change the outcome where there are no margins). We have seen that the factual claim is false, but this is not a principled problem. The Sages were often wrong in factual-scientific determinations. They were human beings like you and me and were equipped with the scientific knowledge of their time; therefore, there is no obligation to adopt their factual determinations. The Talmud’s authority does not extend to factual claims. That authority means that their normative claims are binding halakhah—especially where they are not dependent on any factual assumption.
So if we adopt claim 2 (for it is normative and therefore binding) and replace claim 1 with the more up-to-date information (that there are no margins in nature), the logically necessary conclusion is that there is no situation in which divine involvement occurs within the framework of nature, and therefore there is no permission to pray for anything. Note well: prayers for the healing of a sick person or for rescue from trouble, like any other request, are all halakhically prohibited.
I emphasize again that this conclusion does not depend on my heretical view that nowadays there is likely no divine involvement in the world. Even if such involvement exists—and this is certainly what the Sages thought—still, as we have seen, there is a halakhic prohibition to request it. For the same reason, do not challenge me from sugyot that state one may pray for a sick person. That stems from the mistaken assumption that healing a disease is an open matter and thus divine involvement can occur there without departing from nature.
“He who goes to measure his threshing floor”
There is a parallel sugya that seems to contradict our conclusion (it was cited in the thread here). The Gemara in Bava Metzia 42a says:
And Rabbi Yitzḥak said: Blessing is found only in something hidden from the eye, as it is said, “The Lord will command the blessing with you in your storehouses.” The school of Rabbi Yishmael taught: Blessing is found only in something over which the eye has no power, as it is said, “The Lord will command the blessing with you in your storehouses.”
The Gemara’s premise is that there is divine involvement in the world.
Now a baraita is brought:
Our Rabbis taught: One who goes to measure his threshing floor says, “May it be Your will, Lord our God, that You send blessing in the work of our hands.” If he began measuring he says, “Blessed is He who sends blessing in this heap.” If he measured and only afterward prayed, this is a vain prayer, for blessing is not found in a weighed thing, nor in a measured thing, nor in a counted thing, but only in a thing hidden from the eye, as it is said, “The Lord will command the blessing with you in your storehouses.”
That is, if a person has not measured his grain, it is deemed hidden from the eye, and therefore blessing may rest upon it and it is fitting to request that. Once it has been measured, it is already revealed, and one should no longer pray over it. We see that the Gemara ties permission to request to whether the matter is revealed or hidden—i.e., whether it is a hidden or overt miracle. One requests a hidden miracle, not an overt one. But according to this sugya it seems that the very request to depart from nature is permitted. Rather, one may request only a hidden miracle, even if it entails a departure from nature and even if it concerns the past (for the grain is already in the threshing floor even if it has not yet been measured).
So rules the Rambam as well (Laws of Blessings 10:22):
One who goes to measure his threshing floor says, “May it be Your will, Lord my God, that You send blessing in the work of my hands.” If he began to measure he says, “Blessed is He who sends blessing in this heap.” If he measured and only then beseeched mercy, this is a vain prayer. And anyone who cries out about the past—this is a vain prayer.
He even links this to our sugya. And so it is in the Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chayim §230:2).
The contradiction to the Berakhot sugya
However, the conclusion of this sugya not only contradicts my words above but also the sugya in Berakhot itself. There we saw that one must not request a change of the fetus’s sex, even though that would be a hidden miracle (no one knows its sex before birth). Therefore, in any case, do not blame me.
One might understand that there is a dispute between the sugyot (and indeed the Rambam omitted the Berakhot sugya from his code, though the Shulchan Aruch brings both). I once saw in the name of the Meiri that he wrote that the request here is that he succeed in commerce with this grain, and not about the quantity of grain—which would be a change of nature. That view leaves our earlier conclusion intact (though, as I explained above, even a request for success in commerce is a request to change nature. The Meiri apparently thought that here there is a margin). But that interpretation is difficult to square with the sugya itself, for that he could pray even after measuring. We have seen someone who wrote (see here) to distinguish between changing the laws of physics (permitted) and changing the laws of logic (prohibited). But as I responded there, this is a mistaken distinction, for even prayer to change the fetus’s sex is a change in the laws of physics, not of logic. We pray that God perform in-utero surgery to change the sex. There should be no difference between before forty days and after forty days.
What seems to me most plausible is that this is a special law regarding tithes specifically (see here), because there the Torah promises that the matter will bring us blessing (“And I will pour out for you a blessing”), and as is known, with tithes it is even permitted to “test” God. But regarding everything else one must not request a departure from nature. According to this, my words stand as is—except regarding tithes. It seems the Sages assumed that the amount of grain in the threshing floor is an open matter until it is measured (depending on its nature on account of God’s blessing), and thus subject to change.[7] In light of my words above, it is likely that even in this they were factually mistaken, but the normative principle (that one must not pray to change reality where there are no margins) remains in place.
Either way, at least from the Berakhot sugya it emerges that there is no possibility to ask God to intervene in the world. The Bava Metzia sugya perhaps disagrees, or perhaps exempts only the matter of tithes, or perhaps it too is mistaken. But it seems our conclusion stands.
[1] Perhaps like a vain oath (shevu’at shav), which is also prohibited. Just as there is a prohibition to bear the Name of God in vain, there may be a prohibition to address Him in vain.
[2] And perhaps for one who is not righteous it will not avail.
[3] See on this also the words of the Vilna Gaon (brought in Imrei No’am, Berakhot ad loc.) and the Bekhor Shor (Shabbat 21b; his words are cited in Sha’arei Teshuvah §187:2).
[4] One could debate whether such surgery constitutes healing, but that is not our topic here.
[5] See there how the mother’s condition (who has two X chromosomes) also influences the newborn’s sex.
[6] Involvement in our decisions that does not contradict free choice is impossible—exactly as I explained at the end of the previous column regarding involvement within nature.
[7] In Keli Ḥemdah, Exodus p. 157, col. 3, he proves from here that grain added by virtue of blessing is obligated in tithes, for otherwise they would not have permitted praying about it, lest one separate from exempt produce on obligated produce. This would seem to indicate that such additional “blessing” is deemed a natural matter.
Discussion
The Jerusalem Talmud says that one may pray about the sex of the fetus until it emerges into the air of the world.
It is possible that it disagrees entirely with the Gemara in Berakhot.
Or perhaps the reason it is forbidden to pray for a miracle is because
the petitioner feels very far from its actually happening,
and his prayer resembles bizarre babbling, whereas when
the matter is not plainly evident,
that is not the case.
And indeed, for rationalists like the people wandering around
this site, perhaps it is forbidden to pray even for a hidden miracle.
Ramban (who, according to his own view as well, holds that every prayer is really for an outright miracle, like the splitting of the Red Sea, in his words) distinguishes between a miracle within the ordinary course of the world and a miracle outside the ordinary course of the world. According to him, the difference is whether the mazal changes or whether something within the world changes (see what he wrote at the beginning of Parashat Va'era regarding the difference between the divine name YHVH and the name El Shaddai, and in the section of the quail, and on the verse “for the land to which you come is not like the land of Egypt… the eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it”). According to this, one should distinguish between praying for a miracle outside the ordinary course of the world (like changing the sex of the fetus), which is forbidden, and praying for a miracle within the ordinary course of the world. And according to our science, perhaps one could distinguish between what happens at the quantum level and what happens within the world proper, or something along those lines.
First, I am not sure that this is indeed what they would have ruled. If there is an issue with not praying for a miracle, then maybe they would have said not to pray. But beyond that, the question of what Chazal would have done has no status whatsoever. The question is what they actually did, and whether that is binding. Their authority is not because they are always the most correct, but because what they establish has binding status. And as long as they did not establish it, even if I knew they would have established X, it has no status.
I did not understand the difference. I understand a difference between a hidden miracle and an overt one, but what is a miracle that is in accordance with the ordinary course of the world? As I showed, every miracle deviates from the ordinary course of the world.
Even according to you, we depart from the words of Chazal and their authority because they did not know the science, so why shouldn’t we go one step further and say that if they had known the science they would have permitted praying for a miracle?
In my view it is not reasonable that Chazal would abolish the concept of prayer, which is so central in the Bible and in Judaism generally.
As I wrote, Ramban distinguishes between changing mazal and changing natural consequences (see what I cited above in parentheses), even though both are genuine miracles. Changing mazal belongs to the frequent miracles, unlike changing natural consequences, such as the splitting of the Red Sea and the like. As seems to emerge from Ramban’s words at the beginning of Parashat Va'era, the difference between a hidden miracle and an overt one is not only that one is seen and the other is not seen, but that it happens at a different level.
This whole column is a marvelous example of the level of absurdity (and obtuseness) to which Rabbi Michi has arrived.
According to him, Elijah at Mount Carmel basically violated a prohibition (inadvertently or by mistake). The same with Elisha and Elijah in the case of the dead child. But even by their own concepts, fire descending from heaven and reviving the dead is not in the area of randomness (the forty days after the formation of the fetus), but a real miracle that contradicts the laws of nature (even in the biblical period there were laws of nature. People presumably noticed that objects fall to the ground, for example. Or that the sun rises every 24 hours).
So even they violated the prohibition deliberately. So as a “punishment” for the transgression, the Holy One decided to answer their prayers.
This is definitely a new kind of autism. If the conclusion is ridiculous, then of course the problem is in the premises, or in the mode of inference. That is how a reasonable person operates. Of course, the point is that prayer about the past is different from just prayer for a miracle. Uprooting the past uproots all meaning from history. One could also pray that the Holocaust be canceled retroactively, or that Adam not sin with the Tree of Knowledge. That would uproot all meaning from the choice between good and evil, reward and punishment, and in fact from every purpose and goal in human existence. But not every miracle is a retroactive cancellation. Scientific determinism is not really necessary. It is simply our intuition’s attempt to say that this is how reality has generally behaved until now (and will behave tomorrow as well). But nothing in the cause truly compels the effect. Cause and effect, in truth, are two adjacent temporal phenomena. Even the physical component does not compel the result, because its very existence is not necessary. It is simply our observation that it is usually there. That’s all. In this sense, all of “nature” is a miracle, because the laws of nature are not necessary but are sustained by the will of the Holy One, and He who said oil should burn can say vinegar should burn. In short, determinism itself is not part of the laws of nature. They say nothing about their own applicability.
I have already explained everything. Chazal have no authority regarding facts. Therefore, not accepting a fact they wrote is not a change to their authority. But their normative determinations do have authority.
I did not understand the distinction, nor the logic underlying it.
As a certified autistic person, I can tell you that in my view it is preferable to be autistic than to be a fool. Worse than both is a dogmatic fool.
There is not even the slightest shred of an argument in what you wrote here (as usual) that requires a response. I explained why all the prayers discussed here are not about the past but about the present. In the next column I will sharpen this further. The claims that this empties something of meaning are, of course, nonsense of the first order. I assume that after you calm down, you will understand this easily on your own as well.
And if we are doing diagnostics, I assume the term autistic here serves you to express my alleged lack of awareness of the implications of my words. It seems to me that the lack of awareness of someone responding to words he is responding to is a more severe kind of autism. So welcome to the club
Oh, and as for your “immense” objections from the prophets, the words were truly taken from my mouth. A prophet also speaks with the Holy One and foresees the future. Is he thereby violating “You shall not practice divination”? And when he temporarily uproots a matter from the Torah, is he violating “you shall not subtract”?
I usually do not respond to the nonsense you keep spewing here day in and day out with great certainty, including the diagnoses you so generously volunteer for me free of charge, but I thought that at least this once it would be fitting to put you in your place (although I assume it will not help, because there are fools whose heads follow their bellies, meaning their feelings and anger determine their thoughts).
With God’s help, “Thus shall Israel bless” for the month of Adar II, 82.
More power to the owner of the site, who was not satisfied with one “terrifying Purim” this year, but has privileged us with “a double portion of wrath,” beginning with the cancellation of “sending portions, each man to his fellow,” and ending with recruiting Chazal to forbid prayer!
Admittedly, there might have been room to discuss whether a “terrifying Purim” after Purim violates “and it shall not pass,” but one may plead that because of the difficult situation—wars in Ukraine, attempted attacks, and economic and spiritual decrees in our land—the local master sought to benefit his readers with an idea that brings a smile to the lips, a joy that saves from despair.
After all, Chazal did not invent prayer. The first of those who prayed was Lamech, who asked his God when naming his son: “This one will comfort us from our work and from the toil of our hands.” Abraham prayed for Abimelech and he too was remembered; Abraham’s servant prayed to his God for success in his mission; Isaac prayed “opposite Rebecca his wife,” and was answered; Leah and Rachel prayed for sons and were answered.
Jacob our father not only blesses his sons and hopes: “For Your salvation I wait, O Lord.” He also teaches his sons to pray for their sons: “May God make you like Ephraim and like Manasseh”; and when his descendants suffer in the bondage of Egypt—they cry out to the Lord because of the labor and are answered. And Moses, the faithful shepherd, prays for his people and seeks forgiveness on their behalf.
Samson calls out to the Lord when he is thirsty for water, and when the Philistines abuse him he asks, “Strengthen me, I pray You, O God, only this once.” Hannah prays for a son, and Samuel prays several times and is answered; of him it is said: “Moses and Aaron among His priests, and Samuel among those who call upon His name; they called upon the Lord and He answered them.”
King David teaches us that prayer is not only for prophets and men of stature; rather, anyone can ask and be answered, for “The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth.” And in Psalm 107 David describes those in distress: “Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses.” Solomon too, when building the Temple, describes individuals and multitudes, and even “the foreigner,” all of whom pray to the Lord “toward this house” and are answered. And concerning the future Isaiah prophesies: “For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Thus it is explained throughout the Holy Scriptures that the Holy One hears prayers and answers those who call upon Him: “and He will hear their cry and save them.”
What Chazal limited was that a person should not ask his Creator to completely overturn the order of creation. Healing the sick, success in war, and finding a spouse and livelihood—these are within the ordinary course of the world. Even if naturally the chance is slight, the Lord will not refrain from helping and saving. By contrast, turning a fetus whose form has already been completed is a total overturning of the order of creation, which the Holy One does not desire, and requesting it is “chutzpah toward Heaven.” This is also somewhat akin to Honi’s prayer, “Not thus did I ask, but thus,” which appears like dictating terms, like a master—which it is not fitting for a creature to do to his Creator.
To take restrictions that the sages imposed on extreme demands that it is not fitting for a servant to dare demand from his Master, and derive from them a “blanket prohibition” on prayer—is a total inversion of the will of God, who “longs for the prayers of the righteous.”
With blessing, Chasdai Bezalel Duvdevani Kirshen-Kvass
The point lies in the interpretation of an overt miracle versus a hidden miracle.
1. If the Holy One created a new mountain at night while everyone was asleep, that would not be a hidden miracle but an overt one. A hidden miracle is one that the ordinary eye has no possibility of discerning, even if a person could see from one end of the world to the other, because it intervenes in nature in a subtle way such that only its effects are felt. For example: a student prays to succeed on tomorrow’s exam. The Holy One causes the textbook to open at exactly the page about which the lecturer will ask. Intervention in nature? Yes. Felt? No.
A change in the sex of the fetus in the time of Chazal, and today as well, required a coarse intervention in the laws of nature. The same applies to prayer about the past (not in the sense of a causal chain, but that the prayer itself concerns something that has already happened).
2. Intervention in a person’s choice is not only direct. The Holy One can implant a certain thought, knowledge, or intuition. In a certain sense, all our intuitions were “implanted” that way. Perhaps divine inspiration is a higher level of such intuition, and it is not impossible that prayer can produce something like this at a lower level.
Paragraph 7, line 4
… it is “chutzpah toward Heaven.” This is also…
At the moment, the one who lost his temper here is the rabbi, not me …
In my opinion you usually do not respond to my words because you have nothing to say, or because you are blind and simply do not see what is wrong (“autistic”—lacking self-awareness like your progressive brothers), or because you know I am right.
So far you have not addressed the substance of my main point (namely, the absurdity of deriving a prohibition on prayer from Chazal, without sensing that something is wrong with that). Other than shouting loudly, in the manner of progressives. Calling “autistic” someone who calls you autistic is like calling “fat” someone who calls you “fat” (when he is actually thin) because you really are fat. So I too know how to shout loudly. But as I said, my words are never directed at you (because you are autistic). Only God can have mercy on someone who lacks understanding. My words are directed to the rest of the readers, including my diagnoses of you. Let them decide for themselves whether I am right or not.
And more substantively, I did not come in my words to discuss the mishnah but to propose a possible solution (which is true regardless, and also the plain meaning of the mishnah). I did not address at all what came later in the article about the interpretation of the mishnah and what it was talking about, because that is secondary and unimportant to what I am claiming, namely the absurdity of deriving a prohibition to pray from Chazal against the background of the prophets and their prayers and miracles. I do indeed understand the plain meaning of the mishnah as referring to a past event and not to the distinction between an overt and non-overt miracle, which is indeed the accepted distinction among the halakhic decisors (which seems to me an expansion of the concept of a “vain prayer”). But as far as I am concerned, that too is a plausible explanation. There is also a difference between praying for a full-blown miracle and for a hidden miracle (something whose chance of occurring is very small or negligible but still exists; in truth these are not two states but a continuum that runs from complete concealment to complete overt manifestation). But it still seems logical to me that a great person could pray for a great miracle, and each person according to his merits. But as for the past, there is a prohibition to pray. In principle, as far as I am concerned, one can even pray for a full-blown miracle, except that there is a question whether this is not a vain prayer if the petitioner is not worthy of a miracle according to his merits. Prayer about the past is also a full-blown miracle (more than just an ordinary full-blown miracle, as I said, and therefore I really do not think there is a prohibition to pray for a full-blown miracle from this mishnah), and that is that.
Again, if the conclusion is ridiculous, then one has to change the premises or the inference. I proposed one way. So you decide what is not right in the premises. The fact that you do not feel at all that your entire claim is ridiculous is precisely the autism I am talking about, and that anyone who has ever been exposed to Judaism can feel. So you explain, then, why in the end there is a difference between a hidden miracle and an overt one (despite microscopic physics), if you believe in the Torah and the Bible. That is how a person with common sense operates. This is not the first time I have commented to you here on the site about this matter. There is another way to argue: that Chazal’s factual claims here are correct and not just the physics of their period (after all, based on those facts halakhah was also created concerning the prohibition on aborting fetuses after forty days—the entry of the soul), meaning that these are metaphysical facts. But the conclusion that Chazal today would forbid praying is something that cannot enter the mind of anyone who has understanding. The frivolity with which things are declared here is unbelievable.
Someone who talks about fools.
Your being left speechless is not an answer to anything. Your response is utterly ridiculous. Is the relation between our prayers and the prayers of the prophets the same as the relation between foreseeing the future and “you shall not practice divination”? That was a classic practice of the ancient world, foretelling hidden things. Prophecy is not divination. It is something else. Even a prophet of idolatry is not a diviner but a prophet of idolatry. And if so, then one really does have to explain why that is not forbidden divination. The fact that you do not understand at all how ridiculous your claim about a prohibition on prayer is, is beyond me. Do I really need to explain to you how a prophet does not violate “you shall not subtract”? Prayer is essential to the activity of a prophet (the other side of rebuke and God’s speech to the children of Israel, as is seen many times in the Bible: “for he is a prophet, and he shall pray for you, and you shall live”; “and as for you, do not pray for this people, neither lift up cry nor prayer for them, neither make intercession to Me; for I will not hear you… And as for you, do not pray for this people, and do not…” and many other places). Do you really think that every time a prophet prays he uproots something from the Torah? Doesn’t that sound ridiculous to you? Is a prophet’s job to uproot things from the Torah? A prophet has great power to pray to the Holy One for great matters, and therefore people turned to him. It is completely ridiculous to claim that he uprooted a matter from the Torah, and the inability to distinguish this ridiculousness is again the autism I am talking about.
Besides, I have no need for explanations from you about putting me in my place, because I am not impressed by your words. You are not in any position to put me in my place, because, as I said, I think you lack self-awareness, and therefore I need no validation from you at all. Unlike the other people here on the site, I no longer think very highly of you. More precisely, of your new version, which is the demented version of who you were in your youth.
And if we are already talking about prayer, to tell the truth we ought to pray for Rabbi Michi, that God heal him from the lack of understanding into which he is sinking little by little.
By the way, I now remember that I already pointed out the strange contradiction in Rabbi Michi’s doctrine—which of course he himself does not notice at all—according to which there is a commandment (even today) to pray three times a day and a commandment to sound an alarm and cry out over any trouble that may come, while at the very same time and season there is also a prohibition to pray at all….
As they say: “May God have mercy” (even if a sword is resting on a person’s neck).
By the way, regarding my immense objection from the prophets, I wonder what the rabbi will say about Rabbah, who slaughtered Rabbi Zeira on Purim, and the next morning prayed for him and revived him… Was he allowed to violate the prohibition on prayer? Was he allowed to uproot a matter from the Torah? Well, it is a matter of saving life… (of someone who was already dead. He slaughtered him in the evening and only in the morning prayed for him. I assume that by then he was completely dead.)
Who is this Rabbi Immanuel? I’d be interested to know about the man in light of the above remarks.
Who is stopping you? Pray! Or are you trying to organize a mass prayer?
I did not understand this message. Is there a question here? A comment? I did not understand anything here (and what I did understand does not seem right to me, and I already explained that).
“There is no visible connection between prayers and rain, or between good or bad deeds and rain” (from the previous column).
In this column you addressed only prayer. Could you explain your claim regarding deeds? (How do you reconcile, according to your view, “And it shall come to pass, if you surely hearken” and the like? For whether we interpret it as a deviation from nature or not, it is still explicitly written that human deeds have an effect… or at least the deeds of a Jewish person in the Land of Israel.)
Rabbi Michi— I too wondered whether this was “Purim-Torah,” but I understood that it isn’t 🙂 In any case, it seems to me that the answer to the immense perplexity the rabbi raised is simple—
A) The question itself was already raised by the author of Sefer ha-Ikkarim (4:18), of course in a non-scientific formulation:
“What brought people to question prayer is close to what brought them to remove God’s knowledge, namely that they say the matter cannot escape one of two alternatives: either some good has been decreed by God for a person or it has not been decreed.
And if it has been decreed—there is no need for prayer,
and if it has not been decreed—how can prayer help to change God’s will so that He decree good for him after it was not decreed?”
B) And the essence of his answer is this:
“When some good is decreed for a person, it is decreed for him at a certain level of fitness of deed, and this is the general principle of the Torah’s promises.
And likewise when some evil is decreed for him—it is decreed while he is at a certain level of evil or in a certain disposition.
And when that level or that disposition changes—the decree necessarily changes for good or bad.”
C) In my own words—the decree is not on person X, but on an object in state X. The moment the object is in state Y—the deterministic ‘decree’ obviously no longer applies to him. He gives a simple example there for understanding:
“And this is like a king who decreed that all the uncircumcised in a certain province should be killed, or that each one should be given a loaf of gold, and one of them arose and circumcised himself; then without doubt that decree changes and is removed from him for evil or for good.”
That is, when a person prays, he moves from state X to Y (deterministically, if you like)—and consequently prayer helps change the reality that had been decreed for him—and everything is in order, and consider this well.
___
P.S. I admit that I did not trouble myself to read all the previous posts, because the honorable author is “long-winded in his generation,” and is very stringent in the law of “and the priest shall prolong it,” and the land cannot contain all his words—so I hope I have not burst through an open door.
A question I received from someone:
How does the rabbi deal with the biblical prayers?
For example:
Moses’ prayers for the healing of his sister, the Priestly Blessing, Hezekiah’s prayer in his illness, the prayer “every plague and every sickness” mentioned in Solomon’s prayer.
I have explained this more than once through the change in policy (in the past the Holy One was apparently more involved). But even if I had no explanation, one must not deny what is evident (“one must not deny the perceptible,” in Ran’s language in Sukkah).
That is why his name is Avraham the Hebrew—because the texts he critiques are on one side, and he is on the other. I asked and requested of the gentleman, for the benefit of the universe and all humanity, to summarize his view on the issues of the Critique of Pure Reason. It is a dense text that few manage to get through, whereas you can solve all the problems in one sentence without reading it (I am already attaching the form; all you have to do is fill in the essential part: everything appears in book X already written by Y). So please…
I didn’t understand. The question is not how the prayer helped, but how they were permitted to pray, since they prayed for a miracle. Is it only because they were mistaken and thought it was not a miracle? And what about the Priestly Blessing? Does the Holy One command the priests to bless that a miracle should occur? How does that fit with what Chazal said, that it is forbidden to pray for a miracle?
The Gemara itself asked this regarding Leah, and answered that we are not dealing with a miracle. I explained that prophets (and perhaps also those with divine inspiration) are permitted what is forbidden to others. For them, miracle is part of the legitimate world.
And regarding the Priestly Blessing, that is a good question. Perhaps it may be compared to a request before measuring the grain. I explained in the column that where the Torah itself innovated that it is permitted, then certainly there is no prohibition. The question whether it helps is another question. In our day, in my opinion, it does not.
Okay, if that is the answer, then I understand that this really is Purim-Torah 🙂 It would only be worthwhile to add at the beginning/end of the post something like: “…we laughed, we enjoyed—and now to our actual business—all the above was asked and answered in Sefer ha-Ikkarim; it slipped my mind for the moment, apparently because I did not pray with enough concentration.”
P.S.
As for the Critique of Pure Reason—S.Y. Agnon already summed it up, who according to the tradition said to Rotenstreich (the translator): “Instead of reading your translation and understanding nothing, I can read the original and understand nothing!” Consider this well.
Trying to understand—do you mean that:
1. What is written explicitly in the Torah (not Chazal) was meant for a limited time and is no longer true?
2. The laws of physics today are different from the laws of physics in earlier periods, i.e. the undeniable proof from the sufficient condition is relevant only after the passage of “And it shall come to pass, if you surely hearken” ‘expired’?
[
1. Obviously. The events in the Torah are by definition temporary. The Exodus from Egypt was then and not today. Leah’s or Moses’ prayers were then and not today. It is the commandments that are supposed to be eternal, and even among them there are commandments that are not eternal (such as placing manna in a jar or a fiery serpent on a pole), and indeed they are not counted (see Rambam, Third Principle).
2. The laws of physics are not different, but God’s policy of intervention is different. Then He intervened more (that is, He suspended them temporarily). When God split the Red Sea, this does not mean that the law of gravity was different, but that God suspended it temporarily.
Bottom line, and forgive my brazenness, but I need Torah and I need to learn: because of the persuasive argument in this post, did the rabbi stop praying?
There is no brazenness here. It is an obvious question, and I have addressed it here in the past and also in the second book of the trilogy.
Briefly: 1. Prayer contains parts beyond requests (including thanksgiving and praise, regarding which I have no problem). 2. Even regarding God’s involvement, I cannot be sure that there is no involvement at all. It is always possible that there is sporadic involvement, and therefore I pray on behalf of someone who desperately needs it and has no solution within the natural framework. And even that I do only in the obligatory prayers. I do not take part in any prayer gatherings or recitation of Psalms for anything.
This is true only regarding the expected benefit of such prayer (whether it helps). But in light of my words here there is also a question regarding the permissibility of doing so. Here I follow the common practice: go out and see what the people do. It is hard for me to cancel obligatory prayer on the basis of reasoning when the whole world practices otherwise. Even on the halakhic level, a universal custom overrides a talmudic conception (and there are examples of this). Some have argued that there is permission to pray for communal needs, and the prohibition applies only to asking for a miracle for an individual. I also cannot rule that out. Therefore, for the time being I am not sufficiently certain to remove the requests from the obligatory prayer.
But if I truly reach a clear conclusion that factually there is no involvement, I will stop asking. The halakhic conclusion that it is forbidden to ask is, in my eyes, less solid.
When exactly, in your opinion, was the turning point? And do you think this could change again?
It is a continuous process of disengagement from the world. There is no one specific point. Everyone agrees that there are no longer overt miracles. Everyone agrees that there is no prophecy and no Urim and Tummim. And perhaps the Temple and sacrifices are also connected to this. I claim that the same applies to hidden miracles. When one sees it in context, it sounds quite natural and reasonable.
There is no prophecy, and yet God revealed through the prince Michael that He has stopped intervening in His world 🙂
Your words imply that even in your view the laws of physics are not the final word. I did not manage to understand what difference it makes whether one assumes that the option of providence/intervention is built into the sufficient condition, or whether it exists alongside it.
The main thing is that it exists somewhere at some level. And if it exists, then deeds have meaning, and perhaps there is also something to pray about.
I already answered this. The laws of physics alone are a sufficient condition. That is what physics says. You can disagree with the physicists, but if you accept the laws of physics then there is no room for intervention within the laws, only outside them.
“And He said to me: Have you seen, O son of man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, each man in the chambers of his imagery? For they say: The Lord does not see us; the Lord has forsaken the land.” (Ezekiel 8).
This is one example among many that the very thought you are presenting also existed in the period of prophecy and apparently has always existed. In the following chapters massive intervention with detailed providence is described precisely in response to that thought.
And perhaps the process is not necessarily continuous and one-directional.
At any rate, the owner of the site has already taught us that human choice too is an “external intervention” in nature, for a person’s volitional decision, which is not dictated by natural determinism, affects the electrochemical processes in the brain; as a result of the change in a person’s will, his brain sends different currents to the nervous system, causing changes in the “operation of the machine.”
Accordingly, the correlation between one’s good choice and the Creator’s responding to one’s prayer can be understood, as it is written: “He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him; He also will hear their cry and save them.” There is here a “measure for measure”: one who by his choice changed only slightly his “space of choice” will correspondingly merit only a limited intervention that will bring a minimal “miracle”; whereas one who significantly changed his choice and greatly expanded upward his “space of choice,” his Creator too will enlarge His “space of intervention,” and His intervention in the order of nature will be greater. As it is written: “The Lord is your shadow at your right hand.”
With blessing, Chasdai Bezalel Duvdevani Kirshen-Kvass
R. Chaim Kanievsky, of blessed memory, in practice denies all these conclusions.
In any case, this is not such a bizarre conclusion if the rabbi is in the category of “his Torah is his vocation”; the only thing that would have to stop is reciting the Shema, but not prayer, even requests.
Hello,
Just a note regarding determination of the sex of the fetus.
Although it is true that this is supposedly determined by the sex chromosomes X and Y, that is not enough. On the Y chromosome there is a regulatory gene called SRY, which regulates the activity of other genes and thereby induces male development. The point is that this gene is expressed between weeks 6 and 8 of pregnancy, and there are various cases in which this did not happen (for a variety of reasons that are still unclear), and therefore a female developed even though the chromosomes were ostensibly male. This means that until those weeks there is a possibility of change, since determination of sex has not yet been expressed. It is also known in animals in the opposite direction as well (perhaps also in humans, I do not remember).
According to your words, that Chazal thought there is divine intervention, only that it occurs within the margins of nature, then why do you assume that if they had the knowledge we have today they would have forbidden prayer? On the contrary, one could say that if they had today’s knowledge they would have concluded that everything written in Tanakh about divine intervention, such as reward and punishment and the answering of prayers, happens by miracle, and consequently this is not a vain prayer, since that is exactly what happens constantly, precisely as Ramban wrote.
The response of “Betokh ha-Golah” is a crushing argument that collapses this whole strange edifice, and therefore the builder who built it has two choices: either to say “I was mistaken” (and all the more so, it would be even more embarrassing if he does not address the argument at all, for that would be “silence as evasion”), or to continue sending the building stones tumbling into the abyss and say that because of this, the possibility must be entertained that everything we found in Tanakh and in previous generations (including right up to our own day, when R. Chaim, of saintly blessed memory, was still with us) never existed and was never created.
And I do not know which of these two paths is harder to choose, and may God enlighten my eyes.
And according to your view that God has ceased intervening, about this itself it would be fitting to increase prayer and supplication, that He break the “iron partition that separates” and return to intervening for the benefit of His people, as He did in the earlier generations.
With blessing, Yiftach Lahad Argamon-Bakshi
This crushing question has already been asked more than once, including here (see the first talkback here).
Shmuel, I suggest you drink a glass of water and cool down a bit. I assure you that God will not enlighten your eyes if you do not open them yourself. Out of overexcited piety, you are talking nonsense, inventing claims, and putting them in my mouth.
And really, why not assume that it was not the Holy One who changed policy, but man who changed behavior?
Not that the Holy One ceased intervening, but that man ceased noticing intervention and became less able to influence it?
This could fit with the problematic nature of prayer that you point to. And still it would not neutralize the significance of deeds.
Anything is possible, but in practice I do not discern any intervention, and you would have to convince me that there is such a thing.
To R. M.D.A.—warm greetings,
If you manage to live a peaceful life atop the “powder keg” called Lod, with twenty thousand “haters and terrorists” and stockpiles of weapons and ammunition—one may assume that the Holy One is putting in “overtime hours of intervention”…
With blessing, Y.L. Arbak
Hello, I would be glad to know how one can adopt such a position when all day long one prays in a contradictory way.
Almost the entire text of the prayers revolves around requesting change or salvation.
You have taught us that living with a frontal logical contradiction is unacceptable, and yet you, as a religious person, pray and indeed keep praying.
Please explain to me, according to your view, how you live with such a conflict.
Thank you.
The Gemara does not say that it is forbidden to pray for a miracle, only that one does not mention miraculous events, meaning that miraculous events are not taken into account because usually they do not happen, and consequently this is a vain prayer. But if we take the view that the whole matter of providence, and every time a prayer is answered, is really a miracle, then again there is no logic to saying one does not mention miraculous events, and it is not a vain prayer to pray for this.
Can the rabbi’s words prove the view of Ramban that the commandment of prayer is rabbinic, since it is not plausible, according to Rambam’s view, that the Torah commanded praying for a miracle (it appears from Rambam that part of the commandment of prayer is also request and not only praise)?
Actually, even according to Ramban there is a commandment to pray in a time of trouble, and according to the rabbi’s words how can one say this unless it is a special innovation of the Torah to permit praying?
I cannot manage to understand this: almost every determination of Chazal is based on some factual assumption. A pit kills only at a height of ten handbreadths, a normal house contains only from four handbreadths, a person may carry a shofar in the public domain, etc. etc. If someone comes and says, “I think that factually this is not so; nowadays a house must contain at least ten handbreadths,” would he thereby be exempt from the obligation of mezuzah in a house? After all, regarding the issue of gaps in physics too, we have not really proven this fully; there are zillions of laws of nature operating at every given moment, and we have no real ability to examine whether all of them constitute necessary and sufficient conditions for what happens around us. At most, this is a prevalent scientific view that can be challenged. There is room for the view that God intervenes only in places not apparent to us, even if it sounds like an evasive claim. It is not a black-and-white datum. In every place where my opinion differs from the facts Chazal assumed, will halakhot be permitted or forbidden to me on that basis?
The first talkback is indeed somewhat related, but this is not the crushing argument here of “Betokh ha-Golah”—study this carefully—for here the entire edifice has fallen. In other words, it means that Chazal not only permitted but required prayer even concerning things that according to your view alone are defined as miracles, whereas according to them only something in the past is defined as a miracle for which one should not pray.
People asked me, and I explained. It is explained both in the trilogy and here.
https://mikyab.net/posts/75490#comment-60426
Even according to Rambam there is no proof that requests are de-oraita. Standing before God is de-oraita. And indeed, according to Ramban specifically there is a commandment of prayer in times of distress. I do not agree with that, at least not today. In any case, the vast majority of de-oraita commandments are the product of the sages’ interpretation (as with Ramban here), and not something written in the Torah. Therefore there is nothing preventing mistakes there.
I do not see what is hard to understand. If you reached a different factual conclusion, then the words of Chazal do not bind you. That is assuming they are indeed based on the factual assumption that you do not accept.
By the way, just as you have no way of knowing what happens at every moment, neither did Chazal.
I feel as though you are in the position of the people on the Ynet site and in the book God Plays Dice, where you explain with good sense and understanding that the world cannot be created by chance without a guiding hand, while atheists insist incomprehensibly and with repeated, stubborn tediousness on going against reason and cling to their position, twisting the reality visible to them with eyes of flesh and blood (not only to the eyes of the mind), unwilling to admit that there is a divine hand guiding creation despite all your logical explanations to them. Here, on the matter of providence in our day, the tables have turned: we see God intervening in practice and directing things at almost every step, and you do not see it. Take, for example, a current event: for seventy years R. Chaim was the municipal calming force so that Bnei Brak would not be harmed by terror, and I hear at the shivah the eulogies of R. Berel Povarsky and R. M.Tz. Bergman saying aloud, weeping, “Who will protect Bnei Brak now?” (Already at the funeral itself the son hinted at this too in his eulogy for his father.) Go into the Kol HaLashon website and see for yourself.
The ink has not yet dried on this response to you, and while writing these words I hear that there has indeed just now been a murderous attack in Bnei Brak by an Arab terrorist from the territories who shot and murdered five people there, not far from the street where I lived two years ago. In short, perhaps here indeed God must enlighten my eyes, but do not worry—if you want to make a shtayging in stubbornness, you still have a long way to go. I am always amazed by the greatest stubborn person in history, who rebuilt the city of Jericho after Joshua cursed whoever would rebuild it, that all his sons would be buried, with the first dying at the laying of the foundation and the last at the completion of the building. What did that stubborn man tell himself after burying six of his sons and standing to lose his last son if he continued building? One cannot dismiss his stubbornness merely as “cold Litvakness,” but as something else for which I have no explanation (not even “pride, pride” of Rabbi Shteinman). It is something impossible to explain, certainly to understand. Perhaps the rabbi can give some explanation for this phenomenon? In wonder.
I find it hard to understand when, then, they do bind us. This opens an enormous breach with no end. In monetary law we are in trouble altogether: every person will exempt himself from payment by claiming that he does not agree with the fact Chazal assumed, that an ox is liable to damage in the course of walking, and so on and so forth.
Michi,
I am risking a question that you have probably already addressed here, but Jewish-religious language is a bit foreign to me and I have not yet completely understood your position in this column.
Are you saying that:
1. According to “authentic” Judaism (faithful to the Torah, or at least to its spirit), it is forbidden to pray for a miracle, or only that it is an irrational act?
2. If this is your claim, do you think it has “halakhic” status? That is, is it a claim that can serve as a halakhic ruling?
3. Do you think Chazal themselves, had they understood reality and nature as we understand them today, would have had to establish halakhah in this spirit?
Or the same question in a broader context: do you learn from the Torah itself that, in its view, there is no “logic” at all in praying for a miracle, or that it is forbidden in principle (even if in its view there is logic to it)?
??
I answered, and for some reason it does not appear here. I will write it again.
1. In halakhah it is accepted that it is forbidden. But if it is only pointless, that means God is not involved in the world. A reinforcement of my long-standing claim.
I wrote in the column that, simply speaking, both interpretations are true together: He is not involved, and therefore it is forbidden.
2. Yes. This is halakhah.
3. I already wrote above that I do not know, and it is not relevant. What is binding is what they established (that one should not pray for a miracle), not what they ought to have established.
Can we expect that there are no gaps in nature, or is that only an assumption until proven otherwise?
That is a conclusion of scientific research in physics.
Conclusion: don’t pray. There is no point in purely halakhic prayer, because that is Leibowitz’s bizarre idea, not that of the halakhic authorities.
So next time don’t complain about the long, boring prayer service—just don’t come.
A response from Chayota (I moved it here from the next column):
I just came across in my book ‘Nechama’ (which I am adapting into a youth book) a passage connected to your recent posts about prayers regarding the future and the past: “In Kislev 5733 (1972), Uri, Elchanan’s brother and Yeshayahu’s eldest son, died of a severe illness. ‘Do not come,’ Yeshayahu sent to his son Elchanan and to his daughter-in-law. … During the shivah many people came to offer comfort, among them Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Neria, head of the Bnei Akiva yeshivot. ‘It is hard to understand the accounting of the Omnipresent,’ said Rabbi Neria, and Yeshayahu answered: ‘God does not owe me an accounting.’ He mentioned Rambam’s words at the end of Guide of the Perplexed on the verse ‘I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness and justice.’ Lovingkindness, says Rambam, is existence itself. Justice is the regularity of nature. The moment cancer cells were discovered in my son’s body, it is a law of nature—one of those established by God in His justice—that he will die. Every year, when around the Seder table they sang the piyyut ‘And it is this that has stood by our fathers and by us, that not only one has risen against us to destroy us, but the Holy One saves us from their hand,’ Yeshayahu would add and say: ‘Not always.’” End quote from the book.
In a footnote there I added something I heard from Rabbi Amital, of blessed memory, after my book had appeared: “‘Had I known he had cancer, I would not have prayed for him,’ Yeshayahu Leibowitz told his sister Nechama upon returning from prayer at the Kotel for the rabbi’s recovery. In those days, cancer was considered entirely incurable, and recovery from it was against the laws of nature.”
I am surprised at him. Every prayer for healing is against nature. He surely ought to understand this.
A request for healing means that without divine involvement the sick person will die. I ask the Holy One to heal him, that is, to act against the result dictated by nature.
I now thought that he probably believed that one should not pray for an overt miracle, only for a hidden one. But that is ruled out by the sugya itself, as I proved from a request concerning a fetus.
Beyond that, Leibowitz argues that there is no point in praying against nature, irrespective of overt or hidden. In this he was simply scientifically mistaken. Incidentally, this is a common mistake among biologists and life scientists, who mistakenly think there is genuine statistics in nature and do not understand that this is only an efficient methodology and not a claim about reality. They probably talk too little with physicists.
In the understanding of an ordinary person like me, statistics is a collection of data after the fact. There is no visible reason why so-and-so recovered and so-and-so did not. There is a strong element of randomness in this. Prayer means a request to tilt the statistics. Most of the religious world does not relate to statistics as a decisive scientific fact but as something that allows flexibility.
People think the goal of prayer is to tilt the statistics. But in column 326 I explained that statistics is a methodology meant to deal with a situation of missing information. Its assumption is that the information does not exist, but that is only a methodological assumption. In reality the information is always complete (except for quantum theory according to prevalent interpretations, and there this is only on very small scales; and in any case divine involvement would be a deviation from the distribution dictated by quantum theory, that is, still a deviation from nature).
It is very strange and even amusing to me that such a simple fact, known to any child who has started learning physics, is ignored by major thinkers, philosophers, and even many scientists. All of them continue discussing prayer and miracles within the framework of nature, and no wonder that because of this many do not feel the difficulty posed by the above sugya in Berakhot.
Hello dear one. One may perhaps argue about my positions (and of course be mistaken). But in order to conduct an argument, basic logic and reading comprehension are required—two things your message does not really reflect. Perhaps your irritation got in the way, so drink a glass of cold water to soothe your weary soul. Much joy and contentment.
I just thought of an interesting test case: at the Neve Daniel junction there was a terror attack on a bus a short while ago. In a local WhatsApp group, a woman from the community, a ba'alat teshuvah, wrote that she would probably have to recite Birkat HaGomel, because she usually travels on that bus. My neighbor answered her that Birkat HaGomel is recited only over an incident that you were in and were saved from, not over an event in which you were not present at all.
Sorry, it got cut off in the middle; the question is: what place does Birkat HaGomel have in your conception?
Although that is indeed the accepted way to say it, the respondent was of course mistaken. Birkat HaGomel is always recited over something that did not happen. A sea traveler who did not drown or was not murdered, a sick person who did not die, etc. What she probably meant to say is that the danger must be tangible for rescue from it to justify Birkat HaGomel. But that leaves room for discussion: is waiting for that bus in another place tangible enough? Perhaps.
Generally speaking, HaGomel is thanksgiving to the Holy One for deliverance from danger (my friend Rabbi Nir Weinberg once wrote in an article that it is thanksgiving for returning from an isolated place to ordinary human society: https://asif.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/11.pdf), and seemingly there is an assumption here that it was the Holy One who saved us. That has always seemed amusing to me, even apart from my view that the Holy One is not involved. Let us assume for the sake of discussion that He is involved and causes everything that happens. Then according to this, He is also the one who caused the danger and also the one who saved me. So why should I thank Him? It reminds me of Hollywood stories about a guy who is in love with a girl and hires thugs to harass her so that he can come and save her. If I poison you and then give you medicine, would you thank me? Or perhaps the poisoning is not from Him and the rescue is? Why? How do we know that is so?
Beyond that, in my opinion the causal chain that leads to the event is deterministic + human decisions. Nowhere here is the Holy One involved—not in the danger and not in the rescue. This of course raises all the more sharply the question of where along the chain I am supposed to be in order to justify “HaGomel.” Is waiting for the bus at an earlier stop too early? And what if I was on the bus but not in the line of fire? And what if I was in the line of fire but the gun jammed? All of these are different stations along the deterministic chain leading to the murder, and at every point where it is interrupted I am saved. In principle I could have recited HaGomel for having been born in Haifa or having studied in the Carmel school. All of those were stations on the way to the attack.
So why recite “HaGomel” at all? If the Holy One is not the one who saved us (or alternatively, if He is also the one who put us into this trouble), then seemingly there is no point in it. In my view this is no different from all our other thanksgivings to the Holy One. In contrast to requests, about which I have written more than once that I am in dissonance, with thanksgivings it is easier for me. I am really supposed to thank Him for everything He created in the world that serves me in my life and enables me to function. The thanksgiving is for the world and the laws of nature that He created in it, and for the abilities I was given. The psychological opportunity to thank for all this is when something happens. The feeling that the Holy One is involved expresses an illusion that helps us remember that the whole world is the work of the Holy One, and that one should thank Him for that. Therefore one should use that mood to thank Him for creation itself, the world, and its laws—not for the rescue in this case, which probably was not His doing.
A bit of humor these days regarding Chayota’s question about exemption from Birkat HaGomel for the ba'alat teshuvah who was not actually present at the time of danger: I heard a story from the person himself in the synagogue where in the past he was our rabbi, namely our master the great gaon R. Bunim Schreiber, may he live long. He told us that once he was walking, if I remember correctly, in the north (and apparently was absorbed in learning, as is our best acquaintance with him), and did not notice that he was approaching train tracks, and the conductor or someone there shouted a juicy curse at him (and our rabbi added that indeed he was right in that epithet he gave him), and thereby stopped him apparently seconds before a disastrous accident that might have happened had he not shouted at him. He then went to ask his father, the great gaon and head of the rabbinical court of Ashdod, R. Pinchas Schreiber, of blessed memory, whether he had to recite HaGomel. His father answered him: for an almost-accident—one almost recites the blessing.
Is the justification for Chazal’s mistaken view that there are gaps in nature derived from facts? On the contrary, this is a normative principled argument about how the world is conducted, and empirical observation apparently cannot prove or disprove its correctness; indeed, part of the present essay is about precisely this.
The prevalent current view of the deterministic nature of nature, to the best of my understanding, derives from theoretical causality arguments, and in the modern mode of thought, had it developed earlier, Chazal too would have concluded this.
Indeed, in order for this conception to take hold, the whole historical process and development of knowledge was required. But Chazal’s error is not in understanding the facts; rather, it is a mistaken philosophical conception, and your premise is that Chazal have authority in normative determinations.
It seems to me that you are confusing concepts. You are right that this is an assumption and not a direct result of observation (all science is like that), but it is a factual assumption and not a normative claim. Not everything that is non-observational is normative. The claim that the number of ants in the world is one hundred billion is not testable observationally, but it is not a norm; it is a factual claim (true or false). The same applies to the claim that there is a God (or that there is not).
Ramban (in the sermon Torat Hashem Temimah, around p. 146 in the common edition of Ramban’s writings) raises the following series of arguments (the arguments appear in less orderly form also in his commentary on the Torah):
According to Rambam, nature is absolute and Aristotle’s conception rules over nature.
According to Aristotle, there are no gaps in nature (“not even the wing of a fly or the leg of an ant”).
Therefore:
1. Every prayer for rain is a prayer for God’s intervention in nature.
2. The Torah’s promise “And I will give your rains in their season” is intervention in nature.
Consequently, Rambam must concede that a person has no share in the Torah of Moses unless he agrees that all our affairs and occurrences are hidden miracles.
Must every posek necessarily assume one of these three—1) there are gaps in nature, 2) there is intervention that is not a miracle, 3) it is forbidden to pray at all?
What did Ramban add here? I wrote what I had to write in the columns themselves. Whoever allows making requests in prayer (we are speaking only about requests, not prayer in general) must assume either that there are gaps in nature or that it is permitted to pray for a miracle.
Ramban is aware of the possibility that there are no gaps in nature (unlike Chazal, who perhaps did not think of such a nature), and nevertheless it is obvious to him that prayer is a proper thing.
The implication is that Ramban, as a posek, rules that it is more straightforward to permit and even obligate prayer than to forbid prayer for changing nature. Consequently, once it has been proven that there are no gaps in nature, we are permitted to pray for a miracle (and at most one must distinguish between an overt and a hidden miracle, as Ramban distinguishes). Once Ramban is aware of the same philosophical data of which R. M.D.A. is aware, there is no reason to rule like R. M.D.A. as opposed to Ramban.
There is no need to rule like me or like him, but rather like whoever is right. We are not dealing here with considerations of authority. I explained that in the Gemara there is a halakhic claim (one should not pray for a miracle, hidden or overt) and a factual claim (there are gaps in nature). My claim was that the Gemara has authority in the halakhic domain but not in the factual one. It is agreed in the discussion here that factually it is not correct. From this the conclusion follows. Now examine who is right.
Thank you for the clarification. So basically there are rules of decision here that compel us to rule, seemingly against 1) authority (of Ramban, who is aware of the sugyot), 2) tradition, 3) intuition. A nice move, but it feels like finding 150 reasons to declare a creeping thing pure (“and what use is all our sharpness in purifying the creeping thing that the Torah declared impure”).
I have nothing to do with declarations. I raised an argument. If something in it is wrong, be so kind as to point it out. If you cannot point to a flaw in the argument, I do not see what there is for us to discuss.
Agreed, the argument is valid.
They put my cat in a radioactive box. The chance it will remain alive after an hour is fifty percent.
Now they are about to open it.
Am I allowed to pray that the cat be alive when the box is opened?
Seemingly, according to our master (and our masters, the exponents of quantum theory)—there is no contradiction here of the laws of nature (and the box).
(The idea is not mine; I read it in the book Law and Providence by Benjamin Fine, a physicist.)
As I recall, I answered that in the column. Examine it carefully.
I now see that I did not. I addressed it in The Sciences of Freedom. Intervention where the laws of nature determine the distribution is a miracle in every respect—just a hidden miracle, not an overt one.
To Schrödinger—greetings and abundant salvation,
I fear that after the cat has spent an hour in a radioactive box, it would be better for him to rest in peace and not suffer any more 🙂
With blessing, Shunra Katzinger
In my humble opinion (not a figure of speech, literally—my knowledge of quantum theory comes from popular sources)—well—
there are no “laws of nature” that determine the distribution—that is, there is no mechanism whose results appear
as random in a distribution—if (a big if) I am not mistaken—things are created “there” ex nihilo, without any causal mechanism,
and creation ex nihilo is itself a miracle—the act of creation.
And since I have ventured to speak—there was once a man… and a miracle happened to him and his breasts opened like a woman’s breasts, and he nursed his son.
Rav Yosef said: Come and see how great this man is, that such a miracle was done for him.
Abaye said to him: On the contrary, how lowly is this man, that the order of creation was changed for him.
And likewise we find concerning Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat—
He said to me: Elazar my son, would it be agreeable to you that I turn the world back to its beginning—perhaps you would then be born in an hour of sustenance.
That is to say—every miracle entails a new ordering of the entire universe.
And according to Descartes—there is no difficulty. For according to his approach, the Holy One creates the world anew at every single moment.
I saw that someone wrote an entire book to show that the Holy One can intervene in the world without violating the laws of nature. It can be downloaded for free on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Action-Determinism-Laws-Nature-ebook/dp/B08247WKVG/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=9781032083117&linkCode=qs&qid=1658953812&s=books&sr=1-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.d977788f-1483-4f76-90a3-786e4cdc8f10
Immanu-el,
if you think so little of the rabbi, the author of the columns, why do you trouble
yourself to bash your head against the wall of his autism?
Perhaps you will say: I am not speaking to him but to the other readers of the column—
they would prefer a more matter-of-fact style.
What’s the idea?
He argues that the Holy One does not need to “violate” anything in order to intervene in the world. After reading a little, I saw that this is not all that relevant to what Rabbi Michi is arguing. He too has no philosophical problem with divine intervention.
We would be glad for an attached file if it is written in Hebrew. I did not see a download or viewing option.
It is written in English. You can download it with Kindle.
Could you perhaps explain his words in a bit more detail?
It is very complicated. And I am not sure I myself understand everything he writes. He deals with various definitions of “laws of nature” and why some object to believing that God sometimes violates them. And his conclusion is that one can be interventionist, that is, believe that the Holy One sometimes intervenes within nature, like miracles and the like, without being violationist, meaning without having to believe that the Holy One violates something. Just as a human being acts in the world without violating the laws of nature. And the rest—go and learn.
Assuming you are right that Chazal were mistaken in their understanding of natural reality, it is not reasonable to say that had they recognized natural reality they would have forbidden the entire concept of prayer and petition (since every petition is really a request for a forbidden miracle); rather, it is more reasonable that on the contrary they would have permitted praying even for a miracle.
If so, the halakhic conclusion that follows is that one may pray even for a miracle, no?