PRAYER

My dearest Aaron Hershel,

 

I am so glad to hear that Sarah Leah is well and her labor was light. A daughter is a great blessing, and Mashe Mindle is a beautiful name. May she grow in the ways of wisdom, love, and good deeds!

So I should help you think through the idea of prayer. Your questions were clear enough: What is prayer? What is the purpose of prayer? Does God answer prayer? Can prayer change God’s mind? As always I am impressed with your thoughts on these matters. Now I will share my own.

What is prayer? Prayer is a conversation between Neshamah and Chayyah, between the self that imagines itself apart from God and the Self that knows itself to be a part of God. The purpose of such a conversation is to till the hard-packed soil of Neshamah and let in the healing and life-giving breath of Chayyah.

How does this tilling happen in prayer? When we pray, we read from our siddur (prayer book) the words that have been handed down to us over centuries. These words contain the highest ideals of our people. We read them to remind ourselves of these ideals and to measure the quality of our actions against them. For example, we rise each morning and thank God for our return to wakefulness. We say, “My God, the spirit You breathe into me is pure.” If you are praying with kavvanah, full attention, you cannot help but ask yourself: How well am I doing with regard to maintaining the purity of this spirit?

This questioning is how you till the soil of Neshamah through prayer. This is also why the verb “to pray,” hitpallel, is self-referential. It literally means “to observe oneself,” and that is what prayer is: self-observation from the moral high ground of Chayyah consciousness.

The result of this prayer is a renewed commitment to these values. And in this renewed commitment we find the answer to our prayer.

Of course, I can hear your objection: “I thought the answer to my prayers was having God do for me what I can’t do for myself: heal my family, bring us prosperity and joy.” True, this is the conventional notion of the purpose of prayer, but it is not mine.

For so many people God is a cosmic butler whose sole purpose seems to be to fulfill our every desire. This is not my understanding of God. God is what is. To ask God to change the world is to ask God to be other than what God is. And that not even God can do.

So the fact that people pray to God to make things other than they are simply tells us about the nature of Neshamah and nothing about the truth of God. The power of prayer is in reminding Neshamah of the values of Chayyah and its capacity to bring those values to bear in its ordinary dealings in the everyday world. When Neshamah remembers and acts in accordance with these higher values, Neshamah’s prayers are answered truly and well.

These are a few thoughts on formal prayer, now let me comment a bit on informal prayer. Informal prayer should be the spontaneous outpouring of the heart. Do not ask for anything; simply thank God for what is and look for guidance in dealing with your shortcomings and problems. This prayer, too, may start out as a conversation. This is natural, for this is how Neshamah communicates: one self talking to another. But if done well and with great kavvanah private prayer moves beyond Neshamah’s conversation and becomes a sweet surrender of Neshamah into the unity that is Yechidah.

Let me share with you how this is done. I learned this practice from a student of the sainted rebbe Nachman of Breslov, and while I have adapted it to my own needs, it still retains the core of his practice. He called it hitbodedut, secluding oneself in God. Make time each day to be alone. If you can, remove yourself from the business and noise of life and take refuge in the fields or forests. Walk gently until you find a rhythm that allows you to drop all thoughts of your physical self. This allows Nefesh to melt into the background of your awareness. Then look around at the glory of your surroundings. Feel the majesty of creation, and allow Ruach to fill with the beauty of nature.

When you are ready call out to God. Speak out loud. Begin with calling God’s Name. Yes, the ultimate Name of God is ineffable, but there are others we can speak. I use HaRachaman, the Compassionate One. I call this name aloud over and over and over until I find myself in the presence of God’s compassion. My Neshamah is open to the love that is Chayyah and ready to surrender to the emptiness that is Yechidah. I speak to God of all that troubles me. I ask only to be heard; only to be held in the compassionate embrace of Chayyah.

There are days when I talk and talk and talk and not much happens. But there are other days when I talk and then fall silent. It is not a willful silence, not a silence imposed by Neshamah. It is that Neshamah has spoken and been heard and there is nothing more to say. Then there is listening.

We have talked about listening before, and I will not repeat myself. Suffice it to say that when I listen well the “I” that listens disappears and there is, odd as it may seem, only listening. This is the awareness that is Yechidah. There is no “I,” only God. And in this there is deep and abiding healing.

There are not words for what I experience in this place of solitude. I know this sounds mysterious and abstract. That is because writing about hitbodedut is so removed from practicing it. In fact, hitbodedut is not mysterious at all.

Here is a good way to understand what is happening. In Hebrew the word for the first person singular is ani and, as we have said so many months ago, the word for emptiness is Ayn. Ani and Ayn would appear to be opposites with nothing in common. The ani is our most precious expression of Yesh while Ayn is empty of all form. Yet both words are made up of the same three Hebrew letters: aleph, yud, and nun. They differ only in the ordering of these letters. When the yud is on the end of the word we have ani, I. When the yud is in the middle of the word we have Ayn, emptiness.

Our sages saw a great truth in this oddity of the Hebrew language. For them, the yud stands for yadah, consciousness. When yadah is focused outside of ourselves we create ourselves—ani, or as we have been speaking of it, Neshamah. When our awareness is focused inside ourselves, when we practice some form of lech lecha, inward turning, we empty ourselves of self and become Ayn. Becoming Ayn is Neshamah opening to Yechidah. Hitbodedut is a way of shifting yadah inward.

When this happens, when ani melts into Ayn and Neshamah surrenders to Yechidah, I understand and experience the wisdom of King David when he sang kalta nafshi, (“My soul is obliterated,” Psalm 84:30). This is what our kabbalists call bittul she-me-’ever le-ta’am va-daat (annihilation beyond reason and knowledge, the end of thought).With the ending of thought comes the ending of ani and Neshamah. And with the ending of Neshamah comes an overwhelming awareness of the truth of Yechidah: the unity of all things in and as God. And with this comes a deep sense of ahavah, compassion and love for creation, which is the wisdom of Chayyah. We cannot remain in Yechidah, and it is this deep love from Chayyah that returns us to the world of Yesh, the world of ani, the world of Neshamah.

Don’t give up on prayer, Hershele. Use formal prayer to align yourself with the highest values of our people. And make time for hitbodedut and surrender yourself to the One who is All. It for this reason you were born.

 

B’Shalom