This week’s Torah reading, Mishpatim, contains the charge: “And you shall serve G‑d your L‑rd.” This charge refers to the obligation to pray, as Maimonides states: “It is a positive mitzvah to pray..., as it is written, ‘And you shall serve G‑d your L‑rd.’ According to the oral tradition, we learned that... this service is prayer, as it is written: ‘And serve Him with all your heart’ and our Sages said: Which is the service of the heart? This is prayer.”
Prayer must be service in the heart and with the heart. For prayer involves changing over the nature of our emotional reactions. It’s natural for us to be attracted to things that are physically appealing and to fear things that threaten our material welfare. Less frequently, do we have natural attraction and/or awe for the spiritual.
For Our Own Good
That is the purpose of our efforts in prayer. G‑d does not need us to pray to Him; He is complete and perfect in and of Himself. Why are we asked to pray? For our own good. Not only for our material welfare, to make requests of Him; but primarily for our spiritual welfare, to align our operative consciousness with our inner spiritual potential.
To explain: Tefillah, the Hebrew term for prayer, relates to the root tofal which means to put together or to fuse. Prayer involves fusing the different dimensions of our personalities with our inner spiritual essence, enabling the G‑dly potential that lies at the core of each of our beings to surface and take control of our conscious thought and feelings.
Two Thrusts
This endeavor involves two fundamental thrusts:
- awakening the natural love for G‑d that each one of us possesses. Every man’s soul is an actual part of G‑d, a spark of the Divine that yearns to unite with its source. Nevertheless, because of our involvement with worldly matters, that yearning retreats deeper and deeper into our subconscious. During prayer, we heighten our awareness of that inner potential and give it the opportunity for expression.
- Heightening the awareness of G‑d’s greatness, as Maimonides writes: “When a person contemplates His wondrous and great deeds... appreciates His infinite wisdom... he will immediately love... [Him], yearning with tremendous desire to know [G‑d’s] great name.... When he [continues] to reflect on these same matters, he will immediately recoil in awe and fear, appreciating how he is a tiny... creature, standing... before He who is of perfect knowledge.”
Intellect and Beyond Intellect
Both of these thrusts are necessary. If a person relies only on the essential love lying within his soul, he will be lacking integrity. There will be a schism between his G‑dly core and his day-to-day mindset. Even when he brings his G‑dly essence to the surface, it will not necessarily be integrated with his conscious thoughts and feelings; it will simply overpower them. Therefore, contemplation is necessary. Conversely, if he works only on developing intellectual love and fear of G‑d, he will be forfeiting the infinite power of his G‑dly soul. For intellectual love and fear are limited, while the love and fear that stems from his fundamental G‑dly potential is unbounded, like G‑d Himself.
Based on the teachings of the Rebbe, from Keeping in Touch, reprinted with perm. from Sichos in English. From our Sages & Moshiach Now! reprinted from LchaimWeekly.org - LYO / NYC
