Connecting to God During Prayer
Adapted from Rabbi Braun’s sermon in 5766
When Tamar and I were expecting our twins Tamar informed me that she would like a beracha, a blessing that the children should be healthy etc. This type of blessing is generally received from a Torah sage, a holy and pious person.
I will readily admit to you that this was not and is not my cup of tea. Nevertheless who in their right mind would tell their wife who was pregnant with twins, no we are not getting a beracha. Not having the faintest clue where one even goes to receive such a beracha I called a cousin of mine who is a big believer in berachot and he sent us to Mattisdorf, an ultra orthodox community in Jerusalem, and we managed to receive our blessing.
There are many reasons that I am not the biggest fan of the beracha ritual. Some of them I believe are justified and others might not be. One of the issues that I have, and I think that we all have is that we have trouble seeing things and believing in things that are hard to relate to, that we can’t see and feel, that are out of our ordinary realm of thinking. It is hard for us to swallow that this person, this sage has a special connection to God.
I am not actually interested in trying to address that question this morning, does he or does he not, but I would challenge the assumption that many of us begin with, i.e. The impossibility of it being true. It is not something that we easily relate to; it is as if we have difficulty believing that man can actually connect to God in a real, meaningful and personal way.
That is a real issue because that means that our prayer, our davening is seriously lacking.
Why is that so hard for us to do?
The beginning of the answer I believe can be found in the opening section of this morning’s Torah reading.
Yaakov has left home and traveling towards Charan. He encounters THE PLACE, falls asleep and has his famous dream with the angels descending and ascending the ladder. God speaks to Jacob in the dream, delivers the blessing of Avraham and then we read:
:טז) וייקץ יעקב משנתו ויאמר אכן יש יקוק במקום הזה ואנכי לא ידעתי)
(יז) ויירא ויאמר מה נורא המקום הזה אין זה כי אם בית אלהים וזה שער השמים:
Jacob wakes up from his dream and days: God is here in this place but I did not know. And he was afraid and said: How awesome is this place, it is the house of the Lord and it is the gate to the heavens.
Why isn’t Yaakov aware that this is a holy place when he is awake? Why couldn’t he sense God’s presence before he went to sleep? It seems like a relatively basic question but not many of the commentators address it.
Radak simply suggest that maybe Yaakov is a novice Navi, a beginner prophet. Maybe his prophetic skills are were not yet honed, he was not properly attuned. We generally kind of assume that of course our patriarchs were prophets, but we don’t think about when they first experienced prophecy and whether they had to work at it. According to Radak this was Yaakov’s first or one of his first and just wasn’t very good at it yet.
Allow me to suggest another approach, one rooted in the comments of Maimonides in his description of prophecy. Rambam argues that aside from Moses who received prophecy while awake and alert, every other prophet to ever communicate with God did so while he or she was asleep. In his Moreh Nevuchim the Rambam elaborates on these ideas and writes that one of the prerequisites for prophecy is what he calls a high level imaginative faculty, or in layman’s terms a good imagination.
What happens when a person other than Moses receives prophecy is that they fall asleep, they receive a message from God, that message is then interpreted by this imaginative faculty and only then understood.
Why doesn’t God just deposit the message in the mind and let it be understood? Why according to Rambam is there this need for the imagination to interpret the message.
Maybe the answer is the following:
To communicate with God is not with in the realm of the every day or ordinary. Maybe to achieve that level of communication and connection you must operate in different ways than we generally operate and open our minds to the infinite.
When we are awake that is extremely difficult to do. We think logically and rationally, (at least some of us do) and we are limited by our senses, by our physical bodies and by the world around us.
Asleep we have none of those limitations; we are not bound by what we see, feel and think; our minds our free to roam, to operate differently, to experience the infinite and divine. And we do so by way of our imagination which is the human capacity to think creatively and to see and believe in what is not fight in front of our eyes.
That is why the prophet communicates when asleep, because the mind is open and ready and free.
Maybe that is why Yaakov glimpsed the divine when asleep but not while he was awake. Asleep his mind was much more open to it than when he was awake.
And now you know why there are so many people asleep during shul. They aren’t tired or board, the service isn’t meaningless, they simply are attempting to communicate with the divine.
But seriously, that is part of the problem of prayer. Our minds are not necessarily open to communication with the divine. Our physicality limits us from making the connection.
What we need to do, what will make our davening more serious and meaningful, is to open our minds to the idea that we are standing before God and that we are talking to God. One way to being is to simply be cognizant of the attempt before we start to daven. Think to yourself I am standing before God. I am talking to God. Another suggestion- add personal requests, make it a personal experience; maybe try and understand what you are saying.
But whatever approach you choose, one of the keys to a meaningful davening experience is opening your mind to the divine.
Then you won’t have to look elsewhere for someone to make your requests to God, you can simply make them yourself.
