With the recent High Holiday season came questions. All that praying. All that supplicating.
Someone asked the question. Does G-d really answer prayers?
We all know the standard responses. Yes G-d answers all prayers, but sometimes the answer is "no," for reasons known only to the Heavenly courts above -- but we can be sure that a "no" answer must be the right one because G-d is All Merciful and does what is ultimately best for us -- even if it does not seem so to us at the time.
To this I would like to add my own two cents, and hereby introduce the Gord Lindsay Paradigm of Prayer.
What on Earth does that mean?
It means that when we define G-d answering our prayers as us getting what we asked for, I think we are asking the wrong question, i.e. using the wrong paradigm.
What is this thing called a paradigm? It's a standardized way we use for looking at a given situation.
When a friend or relative falls gravely ill, and we fervently petition G-d to heal them, and then they die; when we feel a deep need for something in our lives, and we fervently pray to G-d to grant it to us, and it never materializes, we may indeed feel that G-d has not answered our prayers.
As indicated above, however, we do have the option of saying, "Well, G-d did answer our prayers, and the answer was 'no;' it's for our own good that we didn't get what we wanted," but that can ring fairly hollow in the face of major disappointment, and worse, it can discourage one's faith in the efficacy and benefits of prayer. Maybe next time, we won't even bother to pray for something, since prayer doesn't seem to "work," i.e. it fails to achieve the result we desire.
This is why I advocate a "paradigm shift," and offer a new way to look at the question.
In my view, when we pray fervently for a particular result or benefit, we should not assess our results by whether or not we got what we wanted. We should, instead, ask the question in a slightly different way. We should ask: "Did it do any good?"
"My loved one went into Intensive Care in the hospital, and we prayed and prayed and prayed for them."
"Did it do any good?"
If we ask this much more open question, we have a better chance of arriving at the whole truth, instead of a limiting section of it.
"Did it do any good?" might, in fact, initially be taken to mean,"Did it achieve the desired result?" but these few, simple words, can mean volumes more.
Our sages teach us that we have a daily obligation to pray. In Hebrew, this is called the mitzvah (commandment) of tefillah (prayer). Our current siddur, the book of prayers and services as formulated by the scribe Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly, contains three daily prayer services for morning, afternoon and night during the work week, plus services for the Sabbath and Holidays.
It's enough to keep a Jew praying. Our siddur, therefore, helps us fulfill the obligation/mitzvah of prayer.
Strangely, though, the sages also tell us that there were, and are, other ways we can fulfil our obligation of prayer -- especially in exigent situations.
In fact, what did Jews do before there was a siddur with all the prayers printed out?
The word "siddur" actually means "order," just like the word "Seder" describes a special order to be followed during the first night of Passover.
Ezra formulated the siddur after the return from the first Exile because the returnees had lost a lot of their Jewishness and devotion to G-d in their years of exile. They didn't know how to pray, so he wrote it all out.
Before the exile, however, before there were any books written or printed out, what did people do?
Just how did the individual pray? (to be continued ....)(Sarah)
