Q&A: God’s Prayer
God’s Prayer
Question
Rabbi, in tractate Berakhot there is a saying according to which the Holy One, blessed be He, prays “to Himself,” and I couldn’t understand what that means. What is the idea of praying to yourself? What does that say about the concept of prayer?
Answer
As is the way of aggadic passages, they can be interpreted in many different ways. One possibility is that its purpose is to express the fact that prayer is not only an appeal to a highly powerful being who will respond and grant us something, but also a way of repairing the soul of the person praying himself. Nowadays people speak about secular prayer (and especially prayer without belief in God), and although I am critical of that concept, such prayer (which is not directed to God) דווקא has a place in a religious world.