Question

Hello Rabbi Michi
The issue of prayer has occupied and troubled me for many years.
Does the Creator intervene in our world in a way that goes beyond His involvement through the laws of nature that He created?
If indeed prayer does not come to change the Creator but rather us (our desires and the hopes of our hearts as well as our moraland value-based refinement) then what is the meaning of the wording instituted by the Sages in prayer which turns to the Creator out of a desire to change His will?
Or perhaps we really are asking to change Him and there is nothing deficient about the Creator in that as many claim in the study hall? And if so why is therenothing deficient about it? For according to this prayer is just our attempt to touch all kinds of pressure points that activate the Creator for our needsand manipulate Him.
These questions and others like them have been nesting inside me without a satisfactory and calming answer despite the many efforts to clarify the issue in depth. The answers that my rabbis in the yeshiva and outside it offer me are far from solving the problems my soul raises about this issue and I remain confused.
Your position on the matter is very well known to me. I am a compulsive consumer of your thought and it captivates me with its honesty and its willingness to follow the truthwhatever the consequences may be.
Your approach to the matter certainly provides a simple and satisfying explanation, but it also drains from me any desire to pray. Becausein your view God has left the earth and there is nothing in prayer that brings about real changes in the state of affairs in the world (to be sure you do not rule this out categorically of course and you do not deny sporadic involvement, but straightforward reason shows that there is no indication that this happens— certainly notin ordinary routine shared by all).
Prayer in your view (like Leibowitz?) is nothing more than a verbal tax that must be paid morning afternoon and evening and there is nothing in it that truly touches reality (perhaps only psychologically?).
And my question is this: how do you fulfill this command over time? How do you utter words that ask for something while at the same time recognizing that thisis not really what is happening in this mechanism? How do you pray like this 3 times a day? How do you manage?
I know that you value responding to the command because it is true and not because of feelings or religious emotions. And perhaps for you that is what reallymakes it possible to do this and to pray. But what would you suggest to someone for whom it does not work that way? Someone who cannot motivate his actions solely because of submission to a command on the intellectual ideal plane?
I would really be happy for help. For a very long time now I have simply not been praying (and not putting on tefillin). It is not that I am too lazy to get up from bedbecause of the weather outside or morning fatigue. Many times in recent years I can be inside a study hall wherea prayer quorum is starting or even leave home heading to the synagogue and yet refrain from praying. I simply refuse to utter those words from my mouthbecause of a tremendous lack of identification with the situation.