Q&A: Does Prayer Help?
Does Prayer Help?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I do not dispute that at the foundation of prayer there lies first and foremost God’s command concerning this service of the heart, which is our obligation every day—whether in our eyes it is answered or not.
Nor do I dispute that many of our prayers may indeed go unanswered.
Rather, it seems to me, in my humble opinion, that surely at the root of the matter the obligation to cry out and pray upward is directed מתוך hope and expectation that, under normal circumstances, when Israel is favored before their Father in Heaven, the prayer will in fact be answered—whether for an individual or for the community.
As for the community, the matter is simple and explicit in the Laws of Repentance, chapter 2: “Even though repentance and crying out are always good, during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur they are especially good and are accepted immediately, as it is said: ‘Seek the Lord when He may be found.’ To what does this apply? To an individual. But a community—whenever they repent and cry out with a full heart—they are answered, as it is said: ‘Like the Lord our God whenever we call upon Him.’”
In the Laws of Fasts, chapter 1, Maimonides writes that it is a positive commandment upon the community from the Torah to cry out and sound trumpets over any distress that comes upon the community, and that this is part of the ways of repentance, etc.
But there it is also explained that this applies to an individual as well: “Just as the community fasts over its distress, so too an individual fasts over his distress. How so? If someone had a sick person, or one lost in the desert, or one imprisoned in jail, he should fast on that person’s behalf and request mercy in his prayer.” So an individual too is obligated to cry out and pray before God over his distress. It is evident from what follows that if in the end he is saved from his distress, we attribute this to his prayer and fasting, and there was an initial assumption that he might stop fasting: “An individual who was fasting for a sick person and he recovered, or for a distress and it passed—he nevertheless completes his fast.”
It is also said there: “One who sees a bad dream should fast the next day, so that he will reflect and awaken regarding his deeds, examine them, and repent.” So a person must assume that there was a personal addressing of him by the Creator of the world on account of his deeds, to instruct him to repent. I do not think this proves every conception of individual providence in its most extreme forms, but there is at least evidence here that the individual person too must sometimes relate to what happens around him as a personal message to him initiated by the blessed Creator.
And another proof is from the words of Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance, chapter 7: “How exalted is the level of repentance! Yesterday this person was separated from the Lord, the God of Israel, as it is said: ‘Your sins were separating between you and your God’; he cries out and is not answered, as it is said: ‘Though you make many prayers,’ etc.; and he performs commandments and they are torn up before him, as it is said: ‘Who asked this of you, to trample My courts?’ ‘Who is there among you that would shut the doors?’ etc. But today he is attached to the Divine Presence, as it is said: ‘And you who cleave to the Lord your God’—he cries out and is answered immediately, as it is said: ‘Before they call, I will answer’—and he performs commandments and they are received pleasantly and joyfully, as it is said: ‘For God has already accepted your deeds’; and not only that, but they are desired, as it is said: ‘Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem shall be pleasing to the Lord as in days of old and as in former years.’”
So it is explicit regarding the individual that when he is attached to the Divine Presence, he cries out and prays and is answered immediately, and does commandments and they are accepted joyfully—implying that he receives his reward in a kind of “individual providence” already in this world.
It may be that nowadays it is difficult on the empirical level to see this because our sins separate between us and the Holy One, blessed be He, but in my humble opinion it is clear from the above sources that at the root of the matter stands the conception that prayer has the power to help.
True, all of what I have written is based on Maimonides alone, but it is enough for me if the Rabbi will concede my point at least regarding Maimonides’ view.
With blessings for a joyous festival, and with a prayer that we merit very soon complete joy in the rebuilding of our Temple, and days in which there will be no empirical doubt that the Lord hears the prayer of His people Israel.
All the best,
Answer
My claim was not stated as Maimonides’ position or anyone else’s. It is my own position. Clearly, in the medieval authorities (including Maimonides) one can see that prayers are supposed to be answered. But in practice it is hard to deny what is plainly observable. Usually they are not answered. One can attribute this to lack of proper intention, or to a time that is not favorable, and so on. Bottom line: it does not happen. I would be happy to see the results of a controlled experiment (two groups, one that prays and one that does not). Such experiments have been conducted in the Christian world, and quite a few report successes (rather minor ones), but it seems to me that in most cases these are deceptions. In my opinion, among Jews they are afraid to take the risk of conducting such an experiment, because unlike Christians, Jews are realistic, and deep down they know what the results would be.
Certainly, in principle prayer can be answered, because the One who created the laws of nature can also suspend them. But in practice it seems to me that this almost never happens, and one should be honest. I am not sure this contradicts the words of the medieval authorities, because on the principled level I agree with them, and I am only making a statistical claim about reality in practice.
But this has implications, because if you think as I do, your consciousness of prayer is completely different. The component of obligation (“service” of the heart) becomes the dominant one.
I think there is a problem with dishonest education, which demands that we cling to slogans just because they are written, and ignore reality as we see it. In particular, we as people of the natural sciences are supposed to stick to facts and measurements. I am not willing to lie to myself (Rabbi Amital already wrote from the Talmud about God, who hates falsehood, and therefore they did not deny Him).
All the best and may you be sealed for good,
Michi
Discussion on Answer
Regarding the question, I will address it on three different planes: 1. Whether an answer to prayer is necessarily a deviation from the laws of nature or not. 2. Whether it really happens. 3. Whether prayer has meaning given the fact that every answer is a deviation and that it does not happen. Let me just clarify that I am dealing here with the request portion of prayer, not its other parts.
1. There is a common mistake here, even among various writers in Jewish thought (we talked about it in the study hall yesterday). God’s answering prayer is always a miracle. Talk about timing, or about involvement within the laws of nature, is conceptual confusion. There is no such thing. I will explain briefly (the points are laid out in more detail in the second book of my trilogy). Prayer to God to intervene in a given situation X means this: without divine intervention, what is supposed to happen is A (the natural result, according to the laws of nature). But I do not want A (it involves suffering or difficulty). Therefore I ask God to make B happen. If He answers my prayer, then B happens. Notice that what was expected according to the laws of nature was A, but what happened was B. By definition, the involvement is a deviation from the laws of nature. If A still happened (= the natural result), that would mean there was no involvement.
Moreover, it is true that I as a human being do not know what will happen to me in situation X, and therefore even if B is supposed to happen I may still pray. But that is irrelevant to the discussion. The prayer is made only for the possibility that A is supposed to happen and I do not want that. But on that possibility, if B happens, then something occurred against the laws of nature. If B was going to happen anyway, there is no need for prayer. Therefore every divine involvement is a miracle.
Where do those who talk about timing or involvement in nature go wrong? Let us discuss each separately:
A. As for involvement within nature, those who claim this assume that there are states in nature that allow several possible outcomes, and then God merely chooses one of the “natural” outcomes. But that is not correct. Nature is deterministic on the macro level. And even on the micro level there are quantum laws that determine the probability of each outcome. Therefore in our world it is correct to relate to physics as completely deterministic. There is no state with several possible outcomes in a given situation X. Note my earlier description: according to the laws of nature, in situation X, A is supposed to happen and nothing else. There are not two possible outcomes according to the laws of nature (though I may not know what the outcome is, certainly in a chaotic situation, but still the natural outcome is one and no other).
B. As for timing, this is simply a mistake. Timing means involvement. Take the miracle of the splitting of the sea. People say that God merely timed an east wind that split the sea naturally. That is just an evasion. The question is: how did that east wind arise at that moment and in that place? Would it have happened without divine involvement? If so, then there is no involvement and everything is natural. If it would not have happened without involvement, then there you have involvement that produces a miracle (= deviation from the laws of nature). Talk about timing only pushes the question one step back: not to the splitting of the sea but to its cause (the east wind). But all my arguments up to this point continue to apply to that earlier stage as well. In the final analysis, there is divine involvement that in situation X creates result B instead of the natural result A.
2. Here there is much to say. In principle it is possible that this happens, but there is no indication whatsoever that it does. Moreover, even those who say it happens cannot know that. Furthermore, people, even God-fearing ones, simply do not assume that it happens (I think we talked about medical studies that do not neutralize the effect of prayers and acts of charity). In my view these claims are a slogan. People hold the scientific-physical picture of the world that everything that happens has a physical cause (and as noted, divine involvement is necessarily a deviation from the physical picture), and whoever wants to depart from that bears the burden of proof. I cannot rule out divine involvement in exceptional cases, but I would not build on it. Mass prayers were not answered (see Nachshon Wachsman, the three boys, and so on). They give us excuses that God does not work for us. We have become so used to this that we no longer notice that these are ridiculous excuses. We see no answer and no involvement, and we are supposed to go on believing that it exists and that no prayer returns empty-handed. In my view, intellectual honesty requires rejecting this.
3. As for prayer’s effect on the soul, I am certainly willing to accept that. But I find it hard to accept that the requests in prayer are meant for that. A request wants to be fulfilled. I ask to be healed not in order to become righteous but in order to be healed. Otherwise I could just recite the phone book (as Leibowitz said about prayer). Therefore the requests in prayer seem very problematic to me. Since I cannot categorically rule out the possibility that God intervenes in rare cases, I do not feel confident enough to abolish this (for myself, of course; I am not a Sanhedrin). So I pray only for people who have no natural option of being saved, and perhaps God will decide to help them and intervene for them. But I do not count on it, because in the overwhelming majority of cases it does not work and does not happen. If I had the power, I would abolish it.
As for the verses in the Torah and the Hebrew Bible that speak about divine involvement, I have an explanation in terms of a change in divine policy. As for the Sages, I do not think they have authority to determine such things. Both because there is no authority in factual matters (again, I discussed this on the site; it is the result of a logical-conceptual analysis, so one cannot really argue about it), and because I do not see what sources of information they had beyond those available to me. On the contrary, I am a better physicist than they were and more up to date than they were in the findings of contemporary science. Therefore I do not even look for excuses to reconcile statements of the Sages on this issue. In my view they have no validity even if I did not think and see otherwise in the world. The authority of the sages of the Talmud is only in Jewish law and not in other matters.
There is much to expand on in all these points, but I tried to be as brief as clarity allows.
See you,
You can call divine involvement a “miracle,” but it is not necessarily in a way that contradicts the laws. The simple form of a miracle is that a stone hanging in the air falls, and a miracle is that it does not fall, against the law of gravity; that is called an open miracle. But it is explained by the medieval authorities that the main miracles are hidden miracles, meaning without an actual change in the laws of nature.
The way it works is through intervention that would not have happened otherwise, but that does not mean there is a change in nature. Just as a person can act in the world through choice—the way he acts is through the laws of nature, but he has an autonomous way to activate them in this way and not another—so that a scientist measuring the data will see absolute determinism, that every action had a cause, but the one standing behind things, causing the causes to act דווקא in this way, is the human being.
This topic has been discussed here to exhaustion. You are mistaken. Every divine involvement is a miracle, and talk of involvement within the laws of nature is confusion. If without the involvement something else would have happened, and the involvement altered the course—then this is a miracle. Something happened not according to the laws of nature. In physics there are no gaps, and when the given state is X, state Y will necessarily follow.
Whether miracles happen is a different discussion. I think usually they do not (I cannot rule out sporadic cases). But claims about a miracle within nature are simply a conceptual mistake.
Every divine intervention bends nature, since without it some random scenario would have happened. If a human being is allowed to change the natural scenario by his choice—is the Holy One, blessed be He, forbidden to? He promised us in His Torah that even in states of “hiding of the face” He does not abandon us, and He called on us to pray to Him: “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” Were it not for the miracles that are with us every day, how would the sheep survive among seventy wolves seeking to destroy it?
With blessings, Sh.Tz.
On Your miracles,
Let me point out again what I have already written to you more than once. I feel that you do not read my words carefully enough before responding. I explicitly wrote that every involvement is a miracle, and I also explicitly wrote that the question whether He intervenes or not is a different question (that is, that He is “allowed” to intervene, in your wording). So what exactly is this comment addressing?
Clearly God is allowed to intervene and perform miracles, and clearly He can. The question is whether He does so or not. That is a question about His policy, not about His abilities or what is permitted or forbidden to Him.
Why is human choice not a miracle?
And why can’t God act within exactly the same framework in which human choice acts?
Itai, you can call choice a miracle and you can choose not to. If a miracle is a deviation from the laws of physics, then choice is a miracle. If it is a deviation from the nature of the world, then no (choice is part of the nature of the world. Human beings have free will).
And again, my claim is that God can intervene, but it seems that He does not do so. Apparently that is His policy. I already explained this above.
With God’s help, 4 Tevet 5780
To the one who says this—greetings,
And as for your question, who says that what God can do He also does?—I answered that in lines 2–5; see there. God calls to us: “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” And reality proves that He acts. For without His constant help, could the sheep survive among the seventy wolves standing against it?
With blessings, Sh.Tz.
My intention is to compare it to choice: just as choice acts “within nature,” meaning that to someone looking from outside there will be a natural explanation for everything that happened—a person smelled food and in response stimuli for eating were activated in him, and therefore the brain gave an order to the hand and the mouth, etc.; seemingly complete determinism—but there is here a psychophysical element that was not taken into account, namely that the soul can act within the laws of nature and cause them to operate this way and not another.
So too God can influence within the laws of nature, and we see a leaf falling on a worm and the explanation is that the wind blew it, but we do not see the psychophysical element that God intervened and caused the wind to blow (even though we have an explanation for why the wind blew, we do not see the divine intervention that activates the laws of nature in that way).
Choice does not act within nature in the sense that it is within the laws of nature. Choice contradicts them, but is itself part of nature. Nature operates through laws of nature + choice. Divine involvement is not part of nature, and it does not seem that He in fact intervenes.
I am unworthy, but I would just note that perhaps prayer works for us collectively as a people, like the blessings and curses in the Torah (perhaps that is why the prayer texts are in the plural).
But more than that, the Rabbi should understand that the Rabbi has never lived in a world without prayers and therefore does not know what such a world would look like. For example, if 10 people die each year from terrorist attacks, we tell ourselves that our prayers do not help—but it could very well be that without the prayers, a hundred people would die. So from the claim that we do not see it in reality, there is seemingly no difficulty and no dishonesty. (I am sure the Rabbi knows the midrash about a father and son walking in the desert, and the son gets tired and the father seats him on his shoulders, and after some time the son wonders, “Where is my father?” One can apply that to our matter.)
(By the way, the Talmud in Berakhot addresses the fact that repeated prayers that are not answered harm a person’s faith, and brings for this the verse, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”)
Does the Rabbi not believe that the Sages had something more than we do? That they were more natural, more instinctive? Closer to the time of the giving of the Torah, and therefore with fewer distortions in their tradition?
Of course, one can say anything.
As for the Sages, then no. On the contrary, I tend to think that we understand this better than they did, because our science is more developed, and because in their time the belief that there is divine involvement was taken for granted.
Good morning, Rabbi,
Following our conversation yesterday after the lesson in the kollel at Bar-Ilan, and as you can see also following an old correspondence—
A. When I think honestly about my intention in prayer, in the middle blessings of the Amidah—I never intended that the Holy One, blessed be He, should intervene “miraculously” for my request that He grant me understanding or send me a complete recovery. The truth is that even if I had stood at the Red Sea when God split the sea for us at the Exodus from Egypt, I am not sure it would have been in a way that totally ignored the laws of nature. My inclination is that the “breaking of the laws” was less dominant than an unusual timing of phenomena that for the most part have a microscopic explanation.
I think the world is also good enough with the laws of nature, and therefore there is no reason to ask the Holy One, blessed be He, to disrupt them all the time.
B. Even so, this does not stop my daily efforts to ask God with all my heart in prayer—because for me prayer is devoted to the emotional side of the service of God, in which the spiritual side of my personality seeks to feel closeness to God. Since we are usually not completely satisfied with what surrounds us and rightly want something better, request takes a central place in prayer.
I expect that my request that He “grant me understanding,” today or over a longer timescale, will be answered simply because I will succeed in setting aside time to study Torah and wisdom, that good people will invest in explaining to me what they have already understood, and that I will have at least a few good insights that move me forward. I have no expectation that anything in the laws of nature will change. Even so, I am really happy about an hour in which I managed to free myself yesterday to learn something, I thank and praise Him for it with all my heart, and I really hope that today will be even better, and I try to ask for that with all my heart.
It is true that I do not pray to the engineer of my washing machine, even though he is responsible for its being able to function according to the laws by which he designed it. But that is because his responsibility for it from the moment he released it onto the store shelves amounts perhaps only, after the fact, to knowing how to fix it and getting fired from his job for the failures he negligently caused. By contrast, God’s responsibility for the entire world is real, both in the sense of cause and effect and in that everything depends on His reality, and also because He can intervene whenever He wants.
C. Such a conception of prayer about something that generally does not require God’s intervention is necessary in any case in the blessing “Bring us back in complete repentance before You,” where God Himself says explicitly, “If only they had such a heart,” and our fear of Heaven depends on us.
Therefore, even if I were told that over the next decade the Holy One, blessed be He, has absolutely no intention of intervening “miraculously” and everything will proceed according to the laws of nature (following what you said, that you pray because you do not know with 100% certainty that He does not intervene here and there)—I do not see a reason to stop praying.
The soul still seeks and hopes for improvement in its condition and prays to the One responsible for it, even if He has educated us slowly toward maturity such that in practice the matters depend on us…
I would be glad to hear your opinion,
A happy and blessed Hanukkah, and all the best,