Vaetchanan/Shabbat Nachamu. Rethinking "efficient" prayer

ואתחנן אל ה' בעת ההוא

“And I pleaded to God at that time.” (Devarim, 3:23)

What makes for efficient prayer?

For as long as the existed on the face of the earth, humans have prayed for things. They have prayed for healing and for a good spouse; they have prayed for fertility and for sustenance; they have prayed for luck and for being spared. They have prayed for protection against what they didn't want and for favour for things they wanted. Tachanunim- prayers of supplications, come from this: seeking to receive chen, grace, from God.

Vaetchanan (“and I entreated”) opens on Moshe sharing to Bnei Israel how he 'entreated' God to let him enter the Promised Land.

Needless to say he won’t get what he asked for, and the Mei Ha shiloach opens on this question:

Why telling us the story of a prayer that wasn't answered?

To the Hasidic Master, there lies, precisely, the pedagogy of Moshe’s sharing. It is, he says, to teach us- not just Bnei Israel then in the Desert. Us too, today, says the Mei Ha Shiloach.

Us the readers of the text today, generations and millenia after Bnei Israel have entered the Land.

And here is his teaching:

A "successful" prayer may not be what we think it should be.

Prayer may not be about getting what I came for.

To the mei ha shiloach’, the Divine blessing was Moshe’s prayer itself.

This is how he describes this particular supplication:

And his prayer flowed naturally from his mouth. 

והיתה תפלתו שגורה בפיו 

Today, we have sidurim (prayer books).

But then, and until the loss of the Temple and the systematization of prayer, we all prayed like Moshe: spontanously.

Like Yitzhak and like Rivka, like Yaakov and like Hannah, like Yonah and like David ha Melech, we just voiced the flow of our hearts.

And we still do.

I heard from such form of prayer just a few days ago. 

It was on tisha b’av.

Like many, on this day, I sought for ways to connect to our collective brokenness,

after october 7th.

So there I was, fasting, opening the pandora box many of us have kept safely sealed for the past 10 months so we can keep going about our days without staying crushed paralyzed on the floor, and reconnecting to the disaster- the last Temple that was destroyed:

October Seventh.

I don’t watch videos of that day. I respect too much Life and the Victims to make myself another voyeur of what was done to them.

I don’t watch. I listen. 

I listen to testimonies of survivors, because this is how we try together, narrator and listeners, just like Moshe then with Bnei Israel, to make sense of what happened to us.

So I stumbled upon the testimony of Liel.

Liel (her name means literally "God is mine") is tiny twenty year old young woman of moroccan descent. Thick israeli accent in her melodic English, TomBoy looking in her beige  baggy clothes, gracious thin hands with a leafy black leafy tatoo, long fingers she moves like birds as she speaks, the nails painted white mirroring her woolen coat and the white armchair she is laying back on, on the small podium of some American institution she came to speak at.

Liel is not “religious”, like the immense majority of those who were at Nova - the festival was held on a shabbat - and last year during simchat torah.

But "not religious" doesn't mean "not connected" to God. 

In fact, and not just for the “spiritual, not religious” type, true connection can find its way to us in unexpected Life circumstances- and sometimes in dire situations.

And like a number of survivors I heard this year, on this black day of October 7th, Liel started to pray. 

When she found herself with two friends, having locked themselves in the small bathroom of an empty bike store in kibbutz Reim, for lack of a better shelter, hearing the screams of torture and massacre going on around them for hours, she started to say all the prayers she knew.

“I said all I knew, but i don’t know many prayers”, she said. ‘

I even said the kiddush.

But then I didn’t know anymore prayers.

So I just started talking to god.I thought to myself: after all, he is my father, and I am his daughter. After all, he loves me. S

o I just started talking to god.”

Liel did just like Moshe did. 

And their supplication took the form of what the Mei Ha shiloach without saying it explicitly, describes in the case of Moshe, as a Hasidic form of Hitbodedut practice:

 והיתה תפלתו שגורה בפיו

“his prayer flowed naturally from his mouth”

This is how rabbi Nachman describes it (Likutei Moharan, II 25):

הַהִתְבּוֹדְדוּת(...), דְּהַיְנוּ לִקְבֹּעַ לוֹ עַל־כָּל־פָּנִים שָׁעָה אוֹ יוֹתֵר לְהִתְבּוֹדֵד לְבַדּוֹ בְּאֵיזֶה חֶדֶר אוֹ בַּשָּׂדֶה, וּלְפָרֵשׁ שִׂיחָתוֹ בֵּינוֹ לְבֵין קוֹנוֹ בִּטְעָנוֹת וַאֲמַתְלָאוֹת, בְּדִבְרֵי חֵן וְרִצּוּי וּפִיּוּס, לְבַקֵּשׁ וּלְהִתְחַנֵּן מִלְּפָנָיו יִתְבָּרַךְ

Hitbodedut" (...) means to set aside an hour or more to self isolate in a room or in a field, and to have express herself in dialogue with her Creator, with claims, 

words of favor, and to request and supplicate before G!d

Indeed, as Rabbi Nachman says, hitbodedut can become in an of itself a form of tachanunim.

This is what Moshe did then alone, hidden from Bnei israel, on top of a mountain. 

This is what Liel did just a few months ago, in a secluded room with towels on the floor so the terrorists wouldn't hear her movements.

And, she recalls, as she started praying in her own words, her body all bundled up on itself, she felt a strong hug.

She opened her eyes. Her friend had been hugging her before, for a long time. This time nobody was close to her.

And Liel felt immediately a form of exhilaration, a great joy, and suddenly she was not afraid anymore.

Liel made it alive.

But thousands didn’t.

A couple of generations before, in Northern Europe, another Jew, Etty Hillesum, a young Russian translator and philosophy student in Amsterdam during world war II who became enlightened in the worst conditions possible, also didn’t.

She died in the concentration camp, and she knew it. 

But she died free from fear and from hatred, and open to beauty and love. And she got to write about it, and through this she still teaches me and thousands of others, till this day, from the other side of death.

This is because she was one with God.

This is what prayer is about.

It is not about having this and avoiding that.

It is about being one with the Source of Life.

No matter what happens to this body in this life. Easier said than done. But nobody said the spiritual path was easy.

A successful prayer doesn’t necessarily mean, as the Mei ha Shiloach suggests in the case of Moshe, that we will get what we asked for.

For the mei ha shiloach, the very flow of Moshe’s prayer, was God’s answer.

We find this concept in many world traditions: 

Sometimes Man’s calling is God's responding. 

Sometimes the response is in the calling.

Sometimes God’s voice can be heard through the voice of the caller itself.

No matter what happens, on a relative level, to the caller.

This is because the Journey of our Soul is much greater than that of our bodies in a lifetime. 

As we are about to enter shabbat Nachamu, this thought gives me a little consolation when I think of what was done to Human Bodies on October 7th.

For the Mei HaShiloach, the fact that the words of Moshe flew with so much ease, was  ‘a proof that God sent him the awakening to pray.’

 ראיה כי הש"י שלח לו אתערותא להתפלל

The Mei HaShiloach calls Moshe’s prayer an instance, in the kabbalistic language, of “hiteruta”: “awakening.”

Usually Kabbalah distinguishes between two forms of hiteruta:

hiteruta de leTata (awakaning from below) and hiteruta de le mala (awakening from above)

The first type usually comes from us. The second type from the divine.

Here the mei ha shiloach doesn’t specify what type of awakening we are talking about. 

And from this we could infer that he might be implying that Moshe’s ‘lower awakening” was really an “upper awakening”:

God flowing through him, through his prayer.

God flowing through him, as his prayer.

This is awakening.

Perhaps in this moment, as he was entreating, Moshe became one with god.

And what better answer can there be to prayer? 

For the past 10 month, I have been both praying, and afraid to pray, for the return of the hostages.

Who am I to ask for that?What if my prayer wasn’t answered? 

Sometimes we don't dare praying because we are too afraid the prayer won’t be “heard”- that is, that it won’t be fulfilled; so we tend to give up preemptively. 

Being pessimistic is a wonderful defense mechanism- it is a way of trying to protect ourselves from being disappointed.

But who am I, also, to not pray for the return of the hostages?

In the end, God will do what God will do.

We already know- we say it every time we utter the words ‘baruch dayan haemet” upon hearing bad news: we are not the judge of truth- reality.

We don’t know a thing about what is supposed to happen and what isn’t; about what happens to whom and why.

About why bad things happen to good people in this surface level of reality.

Why Noa Argamani got, thank God, to get back, and why Daniel Pearl, z”l, didn’t get to?

This totally eludes us, and sometimes -especially if we are looking for a rationale about this- or worse, for any type of justice,  this can crush us.

We don’t know why this one will die and why this one will survive; why this one will be resilient, and this one not.

‘The hidden things below to God’ moshe will teach us later on in sefer devarim (29.29)

We don’t know a thing.

But we can at least have the humility to acknowledge it.

To acknowledge that we have neither control nor knowledge, neither understanding nor a say regarding the phenomenological results of our prayers. 

Butwe can still pray, just like Moshe did -even if he knew his case was a lost cause.

Just like king Chizkiahu did, the Mei Ha Shiloach reminds us (Talmud Berakhot 10.A) putting his head against the wall (kir), that is, the Hasidic Masters ads with a play on words, against the Source of Life (makor) to receive compassion.

Even when everything seems said and done, we can still have enough humility and enough audacity to keep praying for compassion.

Why that?

Because beyond any phenomenological ‘result’ of our prayers, maybe the compassion we pray for is already given. Maybe it is there via the connection we establish with God through prayer.

Even when everything feels hopeless, the Mei Ha Shiloach suggests, Moshe is reminding us that compassion is always accessible. 

In fact it is always already there,  lying in wait for our prayer.

In the midst of a heartbreaking situation of still waiting for our hostages, as we are about to enter Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Consolation after Tisha B’Av, maybe compassion is God, lying in wait at the bottom of our heart, already hugging them, already hugging us.