This week we start The Book of Vayikro, and with it the Parshah’s that detail the sacrifices that were to be brought in the Tabernacle and later on in the Temples. Nowadays in lieu of the Temple and the offerings, we have prayer. In fact the Gemora tells us that prayer actually has a greater potency than sacrifices.
The question however, is that our prayers are made up of several different components, many of which parallel the process of bringing an offering in the Temple. But most of the actual prayers are either words of praise or requests.
The offerings detailed in our Parshah were primarily either to seek atonement for sin or to use the phrase of the Medresh “a present to the king” (a concept that needs its own explanation!). When you brought an offering when did you insert your shopping list of personal requests that make up the entire middle section of our daily Amidah? When did you sing praise to Hashem like we do for much of our prayer?
In order to understand the parallels between the prayer we read from our Siddur and the offerings brought in the temple let us ask the famous question, why do we need to ask Hashem for personal requests, does Hashem not already know what I need?
Reb Shimshon Pincus explains that indeed Hashem has set up the world to run in such a way that He indeed acts as if he does not know about our problems until we tell them to Him! The verse says: “Hashem, hear my voice, may Your ears be attentive to the sound of my pleas”. The imagery of Hashem having ears, shows us how Hashem deals with us – we ask for His Ear to be attentive, and we must then cry out into that ear.
However Reb Shimshon adds more depth. Why indeed is it that Hashem runs the world through this process of ‘make believe that I don’t know your problems’?
The Rabaynu Bachay [1255-1340] writes, “not to awaken You to my needs do I tell You of my problems for You know Yourself what is good for me and how to treat me. Rather I did this so that I will feel how much I am in need of You, and to express before You that I trust in You”.
Or to paraphrase using a fridge magnet expression, “Don’t Tell G-d How Big Your Problems Are, Tell Your Problems How Big G-d Is”. The whole point of telling Hashem our needs is so that we become aware how much we need Hashem for everything. Hashem wants us to feel how much we need Him because only through this will we want to forge a relationship with him. He therefore in His infinite wisdom ignores our demands until we call out and tell Him about our woes – and through this realise how much we are dependent on Him.
When we realise that the requests that we make throughout our davening are supposed to bring us to realise how big Hashem is, we can see how this leads into the other major component of our prayers – praise and thanks. We praise Hashem – i.e. we recognise His greatness.
The Gemora actually tells us that before we ask our personal request in prayer we must first say introductory words of praise of Hashem. This is not G-d forbid to butter up Hashem before we bring out our shopping list. But rather we are being taught what the point of asking of Hashem actually is – does He not already know what I need? First we get into the mind-set of realising how great Hashem is. As a direct follow on from this we now ask Hashem our personal request – to continue along the same path of recognising how puny man is, how needy we are – and ultimately to recognise how great Hashem is.
It is in this way that our prayers are very much in line with the offerings. Just as an offering was an opportunity to come close to Hashem – as the word ‘korban’ (offering) itself teaches us; from the root ‘korav’ – to draw close; so too prayer is but a mechanism for us to connect to Hashem.
A great story really drives home the point: are we shopping around to get stuff that we want when we daven or are we developing a relationship?
An young man in dire financial straits went to speak to a Rabbi about his problem. “I want you to go to the Kotel and speak to your Father,” the Rabbis told him. The man went. In the middle of his davening he felt a tap on the shoulder. A very distinguished looking gentleman was standing there, and he seemed to be in a hurry.
“Look,” he began, “I pledged to give 100,000 dollars to a needy family during my vacation in Israel, and I never got around to taking care of it. My plane leaves very soon. Do you know someone who could use that kind of cash?” To make a long story short, the man ended up with the money.
When his friends found out what happened, they all went to the Kotel. Sure enough, one of them got a tap on the shoulder. It was a poor man asking for tzedaka. None of the others were even tapped.
“Why are we different than our friend who was so fortunate?” they asked the Rabbi the next day.
He smiled. “It’s because he went looking for his father. You went looking for a tap on the shoulder.”
Good Shabbos, Yaakov