Former prayer ban
Hello, Honorable Rabbi, perhaps your approach regarding prayers regarding the prohibition of praying for a change in nature, which you inferred from the prohibition of praying for a previous prayer, is incorrect, and in fact a prayer that is a logical contradiction was prohibited, because if you pray about the past, then it follows that if your desire is fulfilled, then since it has already happened, you will not pray about it because it has happened! And to be serious, perhaps the prohibition presented in the Mishnah is actually a vain prayer because it is praying to change the past (or alternatively, because it is formulated as a prayer for the future for something that has already happened). For example, it says, “He was on the road and heard a cry in the city, and said, ‘May it not be my sons’,” but it does not necessarily mean that I am therefore forbidden to pray: “May it be my sons’ who were harmed and died, that they may come back to life.” Although no one guarantees that they will come back to life, it is difficult to call such a prayer a vain prayer (because what is vain about it? The Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent, and I asked for a request within His power). And even if you explain that changing the past is not a logical contradiction but a physical one, isn’t it reasonable to interpret that the Sages did not reach your conclusion on this matter and that in fact their words revolve around the above principle and not the prohibition of praying for miracles? Because in your opinion, the prohibition of asking for miracles is very difficult because people have always prayed for miracles and were not called sinners (nor prophets), and I’m not talking about the slim possibility that Hashem will break from His leadership and intervene, but only that it is difficult to call something a prohibition because, after all, what is vain in such a prayer (my assumption is that the prohibition stems from mentioning the name of God in vain, but I didn’t go into the issue)?
Thank you and all the best and strength.
I see no logic in interpreting this as a change of the past, if it is possible to resurrect the dead now. Regarding the change of the past, see columns 463-464.
Your Honor, I apologize for my misunderstanding (my words in the last paragraph will be omitted). I do not mean to say that the worshipper intends to pray for the past to be changed instead of changing the current situation, but rather that the problem with his prayer, and the one that makes it vain, lies in the fact that this is actually what he is asking for (if in every request there is something) without paying attention to it. And that is also not accurate. To be precise, the problem is more fundamental, and I feel that I am a little lacking in words to formulate it adequately, but I will try. The problem with such a prayer exists in the way it is formulated in light of the real situation facing him (and it would be more correct to say that the way it is formulated constitutes an indication of the problem in it). The claim is that it is a vain prayer because it places in the mind of the worshipper a reality that is not true – They are still alive at the moment and supposedly still facing danger (while the cry has already occurred and therefore the danger has already occurred, which should have led the worshiper to spend two more seconds thinking, "What is your soul?"), and therefore it makes no sense to ask that they not be (in the future tense, as formulated in the mishna) members of his household, as opposed to the explanation that the prayer is prohibited because of the content of its request. That is, even if I heard the sound of an apple falling behind a wall and prayed: "May it be that this apple comes from the neighbor's tree and not mine," such a prayer is also forbidden, even though it is not a miracle (in your view today, which I agree with, any prayer, even such a prayer, is a miracle, but I am talking about how the Sages would view such a case), and in my opinion the Sages would also prohibit such a prayer, not because of its miraculousness, but because such a prayer (for lack of better wording) is fundamentally wrong.
Evidence for something is the very fact that they talk (in my opinion, so to speak) about a specific miracle that is something that has already happened, i.e. changing the status of things that have already been determined, and do not give as an example just a miracle (are there no shortage of cases that the Sages understood to be miracles?) and also in the oven of Aknai the spring of water will come, etc. are explicit requests for miracles (for the purposes of halakhic debate, no less and no more). Isn't the status of things that already had a certain status changed here in a way that is above nature? And it is clear that they saw these cases as entering because otherwise what Rabbi Eliezer would see in them as some kind of evidence for the word of God.
It reminds me a bit of conditional logic, where when the predicate is false, then no matter what the conclusion is, the statement itself is true, and here the predicate (the one that is implied, such as the gender has not yet been determined or the household members have not yet been harmed) is always false, and then the prayer is always a true statement regardless of the outcome of the predicate, which makes it futile, and perhaps this can explain the intuition behind Chazal's statement. But it seems to me that the person who prays does so without really paying attention, and indeed the real problem with such a prayer is that he does not assume reality to be true in his prayer at all, and therefore the conclusion of the prayer is invalid anyway since it does not revolve around a predicate that is relevant for it to be realized. In other words, such a prayer is meaningless (nonsense) and therefore forbidden.
Thank you and a blessed and blessed Sabbath
Continuing with the last paragraph, just to clarify, what makes the prayer futile is that there is no intention behind the sifa, because the risha that is implicitly placed in the head of the worshipper is not the prevailing reality. In other words, the problem is not the logical error itself, but because of the logical error, it follows de facto that there is no intention behind his words.
I didn't get to understand.
If I pray that x will happen assuming that reality is a and reality is actually b, this is a vain prayer and this is what the Sages forbade. Just as you said that the prayer: “His wife was a prostitute, and he said, ‘May my wife give birth to a male child’” is forbidden according to the Sages from forty days and above, because a birth has already been determined, and it follows from the way the prayer is worded that the person praying it believes that the sex of the child has not yet been determined.
It is permanent and the applicant wants the determination to be changed retroactively.
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