Easy, complex, silly, I encourage people to ask questions. One of the worst feelings a presenter has is when they stop to ask if the listeners have any questions, and nobody has one. When I led the KJ Beginners Service, we would plant questions in advance to generate more discussion. So, please, ask me, your rabbis, and teachers questions.
Last month, I asked one of the teens if he had any questions. I expected the typical teen response, “No.” I was pleasantly surprised when he said, “Yes, I have a question. We daven for people to get better, and, sometimes, they don’t. Why do we pray for things if the prayers are not answered?”
Great question! I think our Rabbis encouraged this question.
“Va’etchanan – Moshe pleaded…” (Devarim 3:23)
Moshe prayed that God allow him to enter the land, but God said no. The Sages note that the gematriya, numerical value, of the word va’etchanan is 515, implying that Moshe prayed 515 times, and he was rejected each time. That’s a lot of rejected prayers. Why did Moshe stick with it? How do we deal with unanswered prayers?
Moshe prayed over and over again to teach us that prayer is an opportunity for us to look inwards and reach outwards.
Prayer is complicated. Just because we think our prayers aren’t answered doesn’t mean they have no purpose. We don’t always know the full picture. We know what we want. That doesn’t always align with what God wants.
Rabbi Aron Moss compares the way prayer works to the law of conservation of energy in physics. That law states that energy can never be destroyed, it just changes from one form to another. There is a similar law in metaphysics. No prayer is ever lost or wasted. Your request will be granted; it just may be in an unexpected form.
We should look more broadly at what we ask for. For example, we pray for someone to recover. At the same time, a prayer for healing should also encourage us to think about how we can make ourselves or the world healthier. Maybe, if we’re scientifically inclined, devote our lives to researching a cure for cancer or take action to support such endeavors. Prayer should be inward directed and not just requests for which we’re disappointed when there is a negative response.
Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb relates trying to explain to a Tehillim group why they keep davening if the prayers were going unanswered. One of the participants was an intensive care nurse. She provided a powerful answer. People find praying frustrating because they expect a total cure. Praying on behalf of a sick person need not only be about a complete recovery. She suggested people have other things in mind in their prayers like the sick person not suffer too much pain, anxiety, depression, or loneliness; that the sick person be treated gently and with dignity by the medical staff; that the veins of the sick person be easy to find for intravenous injections; that the family have the strength to hold up under the strain and to not abandon the patient; that the correct decisions, medical and ethical, be taken by the family, patient, doctor, and rabbi. The nurse said, “"If you pray for all of the above for a sick person, you will find that many of your prayers will be answered."
There is a lot to pray for. Making requests of God should not be a binary exercise for which the only responses are yes or no. We need to consider all the possibilities and expand our horizons.
We also should view prayer as an opportunity to reach out God regardless of the “answer.”
Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik captures this endeavor in Worship of the Heart (p. 63):
“Contact is established with the Almighty in the abyss of a warm heart, in a love-sick soul, in the experience of the invisible, in the richness of the inner life, in being aware of something supernal, great, awesome and beautiful, although this ‘something’ is neither seen nor heard…In a word, the aesthetic experience of God, whether constructed of impressions and sensations drawn from our daily life…or consisting of ecstatic emotions, in the throbbing of the heart and the longing of the soul, is the basis of the community of God and man. It is impossible to imagine prayer without, at the time, feeling the nearness and greatness of the Creator, His absolute justice, His fatherly concern with human affairs, His anger and wrath caused by unjust deeds. When we bow in prayer, we must experience His soothing hand and the infinite love and mercy for His creatures. We cling to Him as a living God, not as an idea, as an abstract Being. We are in His company and are certain of His sympathy. There is in prayer an experience of emotions which can only be produced by direct contact with God.”
Prayer is about reaching out to God since we are not in control. We think we know what we want, and we can (and should) allow prayer to shape how we will respond to a given situation. At the same time, prayer opens us up to a higher reality which defies logic.
The Maggid of Mezeritch captures this more mystical aspect of prayer:
“The Purpose of all prayer is to uplift the words, to return them to their source above. The world was created by the downward flow of letters: Our task is to form those letters into words and take them back to God. If you come to know this dual process, your prayer may be joined to the constant flow of Creation - word to word, voice to voice, breath to breath, thought to thought. The divine spring is ever-flowing: make yourself into a channel to receive the waters from above.”
Jews do a lot of davening. We also encounter many situations where it seems our prayers are unanswered. This moment – the days after Tisha B’Av and ten months after October 7 – hammers home the many unanswered questions and unresolved trauma we experience nationally and personally.
We always read Va’etchanan the Shabbat after Tisha B’Av. It provides us with the hope, faith, strength and resolve that our prayers work exactly the way we intend them – even if the answer is no.
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