Parashat Va’Etchanan – The Dynamics of Prayer

This week’s Torah portion is, spiritually, on of the richest in the Torah. The 10 commandments are here, the Shema is here, and a lot of instructions from Moses. Put them all together and you have a very impressive collection of teachings.

The portion begins with a very strange episode. G-d has told Moses that he will not enter into the land of Israel. Moses prays and prays and prays. Eventually G-d has enough and tells Moses to go up on the Mountain and look onto the land but that he will never enter it. Not only does G-d not accept Moses’ prayer, G-d tells Moses that he doesn’t want him to pray anymore.

There seem to be two issues here. Number 1, Moses is surely a great man, so why doesn’t G-d accept his prayer? Second, if G-d hasn’t accepted his prayer until now, why tell him to stop praying? Basically, these boil down to the question of “How does prayer work?”

The Talmud addresses this issue with the following. Say you have two people, seemingly identical from the outside, with the same illness. They both pray for health, but one lives and one dies. The Talmud gives two explanations as to why one person’s prayers were answered, and the other’s wasn’t.

The first explanation says that one of the people prayed with all their heart, and the other didn’t. So according to this approach, the difference between a prayer being answered or not, is the intensity of the prayer, and the devotion of the person praying.

The second explanation says the first person prayed before his final sentence was announced in heaven, and the second person after it was pronounced. So this approach says it’s all about timing. Praying only helps until G-d has made his decision. Once he’s passed his judgment, there is nothing praying can do.

There are sources that hold by the second position, but it seems that the first position is the more commonly accepted in Jewish thought. So that raises the question; why then did G-d tell Moses to stop praying? We’ll need to look into prayer a bit deeper to understand.

Lets look back at the sick people from the Talmud. The illness is not the problem; it’s the symptom. The problem is a distancing from G-d, which could sometimes have severe consequences. The person got a message from G-d (the illness) alerting his to the problem and tries to correct the problem by bringing himself closer top G-d through prayer. If that prayer is intense enough, according to the first position in the Talmud, the distancing from F-d will be healed, and there will no longer be a need for the illness, so it will go away.

So let’s look at Moses’ case. G-d tells Moses not to pray anymore, because there was no problem with their relationship. As we said, prayer can raise your relationship with G-d to a higher level, but there was no higher level for Moses’ relationship with G-d, it was perfect. So why couldn’t Moses enter the land? Does it have anything to do with Moses? No, it has to do with the people. Once you understand that, you see why G-d told Moses not to pray anymore. G-d was saying ‘It’s not about you, its about the people.” It’s not that Moses’ prayers will not be answered, it’s that they cannot be answered because the people had distanced themselves from G-d.

This gives us some insight into why so much of Jewish teaching has to do with community. Perfecting our own personal relationship with G-d will only take us so far; the pinnacle can only be reached when the entire Jewish people mend their relationships with G-d.

Shabbat Shalom