Ekev (Rambam)

“Service of the Heart—That is Prayer”

Alongside the many general exhortations to observe the mitzvot, this week’s parsha contains several specific mitzvot—perhaps first and foremost among them the call “to serve God with all your heart,” interpreted by Hazal as referring specifically to prayer—or, more aptly, the Hebrew tefillah. Hence, this number shall be devoted to several salient aspects of Maimonides’ understanding of the nature of prayer. We read in Hilkhot Tefillah 1.1:

1. It is a positive commandment to pray every day, as is said, “and you shall serve the Lord your God” [Exod 23:25]. From the oral tradition they learned that this service refers to prayer, as is said, “to serve Him with all your heart” [Deut 11:13]. Our Sages said: “What service is it that is of the heart? That is prayer.”

The first surprising thing about this formulation is that the essence of the obligation of tefillah is defined here as “service of God.” Although I have translated the Hebrew word tefillah here as “prayer,” it is important to remember that the English word has rather different connotations—specifically, that of “a humble entreaty addressed to God; earnest request; supplication,” etc. Prayer as petition, asking, beseeching God, is but one aspect of prayer—that whose focus is on human need—and, as we shall see, it is not necessarily the most important, sublime, or central one. The definition of tefillah as a form of Divine service, or avodah, moves the emphasis upon prayer as an act focused upon “giving” to God, so to speak, rather than as a means of persuading the Almighty to give special consideration to one or another human need.

The second half of the definition—“… of the heart,” in contradistinction to “service of the limbs”—at once implies two things: that prayer is in some sense a counterpart to the system of sacrificial offerings in the Temple, which was known as avodah; and that unlike the Temple cult, the essence of prayer is inward, located in the human heart, and that the periodic directing by men and women of their thoughts and emotions towards God is in itself a great gift. We continue:

And the number of prayers is not from the Torah, nor is the formulation [i.e., wording] of this prayer from the Torah; and prayer has no fixed time from the Torah.

The second important point made here, in this opening halakhah (which, like the opening halakhot in most treatises of the Yad, serves the function of providing basic definitions), is that, in the most basic sense, prayer is formless. That is, the familiar rubric of three daily prayers at fixed times, of a standard text of the Amidah, is secondary to the root nature of prayer. All that is the result of later Rabbinic enactments, as Rambam explains a few paragraphs later. In the most essential sense, any act that falls under the rubric of “service of the heart,” in which man addresses his Maker, is a form of tefillah. Thus, the rabbis of the school of Brisk, with their genius for succinct formulation of the underlying concepts of the halakhah, described prayer as amidah lifnei ha-Shem, the act of [consciously] “standing before God.”

The implications of this conception are explored in the next section:

2. Hence women and servants are obligated in prayer, because it is a positive commandment not precipitated by time.

Even though prayer is associated in the popular mind with three-fold daily worship (already alluded to in the Bible, as in Psalm 55:18 and Daniel 6:11), Rambam here stresses the core sense of prayer: to address God, to engage in some form of inner service, every day. Since this is not time-related, women (who are, with certain notable exceptions, not subject to time-bound mitzvot) are in principle obligated to pray. Or, as the Talmud puts it (here emphasizing the aspect of prayer as seeking Divine favor); “If men need Divine mercy, are not women likewise in need of mercy?”

The execution of this obligation on the part of women has been interpreted in widely varying ways through the centuries. The minimalists say that any brief words of prayer uttered by a woman, in any language, in any physical posture, is considered a fulfillment of the obligation to engage in tefillah (thus Be’er Heitev at O.H. 106.i). Others require her to must recite the regular Amidah at least once a day, taking Rambam’s “every day” literally. On the other extreme, today there is a considerable “maximalist” school who argue that, given the premise that the core obligation is not time-bound, once woman are seen as obligated they too must follow the Rabbinic structure of thrice, or at least twice-daily prayer (given that Ma’ariv is not fully obligatory). Hence, many graduates of women’s seminaries and the like may be seen today scrupulously reciting both Shaharit and Minhah every day.

Rather, the obligation of this mitzvah is this: that a person should petition and pray [God] every day; he should recite the praises of the Holy One blessed be He, and thereafter request those things that he is in need of, with petition and supplication. And thereafter he gives praise and thanks to the Lord for the good things that he has caused to flow upon him—each person according to his ability.

Here Rambam provides a kind of basic structure or order of prayer. I read the phrase, “should petition and pray [God] every day” as the basic definition of prayer: that prayer involves an act of asking God for one’s needs—or, more accurately, coming to Him as a supplicant (mithanen)—as well as something else, called tefillah. He then goes on to describe the basic tri-partite structure of prayer: praise, petition, and thanks, corresponding to the opening three blessings of the Amidah, the middle blessings (13 petitionary blessings on weekdays; one blessing on Sabbath and festival days about “the matter of the day”; three in Musaf of Rosh Hashanah); and the three concluding blessings. But Rambam has not yet stated that there is such a thing as the Amidah; rather, this three-fold structure seems to reflect a certain innate, natural flow of prayer as such. One cannot rush into the presence of a king or high dignitary and immediately ask for favors: one first needs to establish or define a certain relationship with him: the first three blessings, or their formless pre-Rabbinic equivalent, do just that. Similarly, one cannot just say one’s piece and ask for what one wants without some closing words of thanks, a certain element of etiquette, of politeness, and of dignified and respectful leave-taking.

The next halakhah discusses how, originally, each individual would improvise his own manner of prayer. §4 in turn explains the transition to structured prayer. I find this passage particularly interesting, based as it is, not upon any particular Rabbinic midrash, but largely upon Rambam’s own words. Earlier this year we saw that Rambam was interested in reconstructing how various things came to be as they are, propounding various theories of their origins. Thus, he deals with the origin of idolatry (Avodat Kokhavim Ch. 1; see HY V: Lekh lekha) and with the origin of marriage and of promiscuous sex (Ishut 1:1-4, HY V: Vayeshev). Here, in Tefillah 1.4, he addresses the origin of Jewish prayer as we know it:

4. Once Israel went into exile in the days of the evil Nebuchadnezzar, they became mixed among Persia and Greece and the other nations, and sons were born to them in the Gentile lands, and the language of those sons was confused, and the language of each was mixed from many languages. And whenever he spoke he could not express himself fully in one language, but in a confused manner, as is said, “And their children spoke half-Ashdodite, and they could not speak the language of Judah [i.e., Hebrew], but the language of each people” [Neh 13:24]. As a result of this, when a person would attempt to pray his language was inadequate to state his wishes or to recite the praise of the Holy One blessed be He in the holy tongue, but they mixed with it other languages. And when Ezra and his Court saw this, they stood up and instituted the eighteen blessings according to their order….. (5) And they also instituted the number of [daily] prayers….

The Jews in their exile spoke a veritable babel of tongues. But they did not become fully acculturated to their new languages: rather, they speak fragments of one language and fragments of another. Jews seem to have a propensity for being polyglots. My brother once said of a distinguished Zionist leader of the old generation, whose wanderings had taken him from Eastern Europe, through Central and Western Europe, to England, the United States and ultimately to Israel,: “He’s illiterate in nine languages.” Similarly, the newest Jewish language, “Yeshivish,” is a hybrid, rather lacking in any elegance of its own (to rather understate the case). In any event, since many of them were inarticulate and unable to formulate their thoughts before God in a half-reasonable way, Ezra and his court intruded a fixed liturgy, as well as statutory prayers—thus Rambam.

Thus far, prayer as understood by Rambam. By contrast, Ramban—R Moses ben Nahman (1194-ca. 1270), the leading Catalonian halakhic authority about half a century after Rambam, author of a major commentary on the Torah, of important glosses on several major halakhic works, as well as his own novellea, and other halakhic and proto-Kabbalistic philosophic works—states that prayer is not in fact a Torah-mandated mitzvah at all, but rather a Rabbinic ordinance. In his gloss to Rambam’s Sefer ha-Mitzvot (Aseh §5), he invokes an impressive array of Talmudic sources to prove this point. Moreover, he asserts that the verse from this week’s Torah portion cited by Rambam as the source for this mitzvah, “to serve Him with all your heart,” is an fact a general command to perform all the mitzvot with the fullness of one’s heart—that is, with kavvanah, with full attention and direction of our minds and hearts—and not in lackadaisical or mechanical fashion.

What then is prayer according to Ramban? He concludes the above gloss by saying that “if there is a certain root for prayer in the Torah… it is as a mitzvah in times of trouble, namely, to believe that He listens to prayer, and it is He who saves us from trouble through prayer and crying out.” In other words, prayer is not so much a form of service as it is a kindness that God does with us, graciously granting us this access to Him in times of trouble—and that as such, it is very much human-oriented, and focused upon the supplicatory, petitionary forms of prayer. Nevertheless, this does not reduce the act of prayer to the spiritual equivalent of putting a card in the ATM, a mere mechanism for fulfillment of the wishes of needy man. There is a depth dimension to this approach to prayer as well: first, as an expression of faith in God’s mercy and lovingkindness; second, as a form of affirming the connection between man and God. By turning to God when we are in need, we are acknowledging our dependence upon Him, and thus our faith and belief in Him, and the centrality to our lives of our connection to Him. This too is a form of avodah. Indeed, one oft-repeated motif in the Midrash is that God causes certain difficulties in life—for example, the barrenness of the matriarchs or of Hannah—because He “desired the prayer of the righteous.” Thirdly, prayers on behalf of the People Israel—and these constitute fully half of the middle section of the weekday Amidah, with its rubric of petitionary blessings—can be seen in some sense as prayers to magnify God’s Name in the world, based on the idea that Knesset Yisrael, the Congregation of Israel, and God are inextricably related; that Israel as a whole is God’s witness in this world. Hence, prayer on behalf of Israel is ipso facto also prayer on behalf of the Shekhinah.”

An interesting fact viz. the issue of prayer as avodah vs. prayer as supplication: while I do not have any exact numbers, it seems clear that nearly half or more of the 150 psalms of Sefer Tehillim are personal prayers, uttered in situations of travail. Yet of the 30 or 40 psalms which form the “daily bread” of the observant Jew—i.e., those used in the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual liturgy—all but a handful are psalms of praise, unadulterated by expression of need. We shall return to this point in due time.

To complete this topic, I would like to offer a possibly outrageous analogy: in any marriage, there are mutual rights and obligations, duties and privileges, times during which one side is engaged more in giving and the other in receiving, and others when this pattern is reversed. In like fashion, when we speak of prayer as avodah, in which the focus is on man’s service of God, the flow is, so to speak, from man to God; whereas in prayer as supplication, as the means by which man conveys to God his own needs, man is on the receiving end, and the flow is from God to man.

But what happens in marital intimacy? Hopefully (and ideally), the barriers between giving and receiving, between self and other, fall, and the act of giving pleasure and of being pleasured become one; each partner derives pleasure for him/herself and for the other, that is, ultimately, from the connection itself. May this serve as a parable for the man-God relation, as epitomized in prayer? Erotic imagery was foreign, neither to the Bible, nor to the masters of Midrash, nor to the Hasidic teachers, nor to the Rambam. As Rambam puts it in the culminating chapter of Sefer ha-Mada, devoted to the pure love of God, “and all of Song of Songs is a metaphor for this matter” (Teshuvah 10.3).

Would Rambam Have been a Hassid or Mitnagged?

On yet another level, the dispute between Rambam and Ramban is a basic dispute running throughout the history of Jewish thought. At times I wonder whether, if Rambam had lived six hundred years later, he would have been a Hasid or a Mitnagged. The basic difference between these two approaches has been summed up in the two words: prayer vs. Torah. The old Rabbinic tradition, exemplified by the Gaon of Vilna, R. Hayyim of Volozhin, and their followers, sees the focal point of Jewish spiritual life in the intensive study of Torah—of Mishnah, Talmud, rishonim and aharonim, the vast literature of commentaries and responsa, novellea and halakhic codes—to which every possible moment of waking time is to be devoted. The Hasidic approach, by contrast, sees the essence of a person’s obligation in this world in terms of avodah, Divine service. This of course includes Torah study, but its acme is in the hour of prayer, to which intensive preparation and concentrated energies are devoted.

There are many Hasidic stories that illustrate this point. It is related of Rav Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the founder of Habad, that at a critical juncture in his life he faced the decision whether to go to Vilna or to Mezhirech. Were he to take the former route, he would “learn how to learn,” that is, he would acquire methods for understanding the sacred texts in greater depth and profundity. But were he to go to Mezhirech, he would learn from the Holy Maggid how to pray: and this, for all his erudition, he did not know. Or it is told that R. Yaakov Yosef of Polonnoye—author of the first book of Hasidic homilies ever published, Toldot Ya’akov Yosef—once said “It is more difficult for me to pray one Shemonah Esreh than it is to learn eight pages of Talmud.”

When I was a college student, I once visited a Hasidic family, where the woman of the house told me, “My father was so pious that he finished saying Shemonah Esreh of Shaharit [the Morning Prayer] every day at sunset.” Such a statement can elicit either admiration or ridicule, depending on one’s viewpoint. To the Litvak, such a thing is ludicrous, if not impious: Shaharit is meant to be recited within a certain time frame, certainly long before midday, so that its postponement till sunset (by which time a person should have also davened Minhah, not to mention putting in a full day of work, study, good deeds, etc.) is almost blasphemous. But to the Hasid, the intensity and single-minded powers of concentration and his ecstatic, devekut-filled prayer, are a source of wonder.

What then is so difficult about prayer, that there are all these tales? There is a certain paradox here: prayer is part of the religious Jew’s daily routine; it is a seemingly simple act: you stand up, you open the Siddur, and you read the words until you finish. And yet, there is something astonishing about it, wondrous, not of this world. If a person were to truly think about the opening words of prayer, Barukh atah, “Blessed are You,” he would be overwhelmed by the thought that he is at that moment literally standing before the Creator of the entire Cosmos—a fact that the mind cannot begin to comprehend. Were one to really understood one word of prayer, any word, in all its implications, and meditate upon it deeply enough, one’s mind would be literally blown away. As another hasidic master put it, “If you can say Barukh atah and still remain alive, it is a sign that you’re not really davening.”

Where did Rambam stand on all this? In Hilkhot Talmud Torah he speaks of the ideal of one who is “crowned with the crown of Torah,” but immediately qualifies this by stating that such learning involves not only Talmud and halakhah, but also Pardes—i.e., knowledge of the Works of Creation and of the Divine Chariot (see HY V: Shavuot). Or, as he says elsewhere, the ultimate aim of all is that the world should overflow with people imbued with the “knowledge of God.” His goal is thus neither simply intellectual nor simply devotional, but a kind of application of the intellect that leads to the love of God—a kind of gnosis, or cognition of the Divine. Within this framework, his model for tefillah seems closer to that of Hasidism than to that of the other school.

As for the mainstream of Hasidism, it tends to totally de-emphasize petitionary prayer, as a lower level, or even as not desirable at all. For example, Sefat Emet (Vaethanan, 5633, s.v. bamidrash) pushes this idea to its logical conclusion—that when praying, “one should forget one’s needs completely, and pray for the praise of God alone.” Through prayer as pure avodah, one arouses a “time of grace,” and God will automatically see to one’s needs, “by the way.”

The Role of Kavvanah in Rambam

Following the first few chapters, In which Rambam defines the nature of prayer, its times, its text, etc. , there are two chapters in which he presents various laws pertaining to prayer: in Chapter 4, “five things that are essential for prayer”—i.e., whose absence or violation disqualifies prayer; and, in Chapter 5, “eight things that, though their absence doesn’t disqualify the prayer, a person should pay attention to them.” It is in the former context that he mentions kavvanah—the obligation to pray with proper “intent.” Interestingly, this is listed alongside such basic physical requirements as that the place of prayer be clean, that one’s private body parts be covered, and that one’s body be in a clean state, both externally and internally; the requirement of kavvanah is the only law of a “spiritual” or psychological nature found in this chapter. Hilkhot Tefillah 4.15:

15. “Intention of the heart.” How so? Any prayer that is [recited] without intention is not prayer. And if he prayed without intention, he must pray again with intention. If his mind was confused and his heart troubled, he may not pray until his mind is settled. Therefore, one who returns from the road and is tired or pained is not allowed to pray until his mind is settled. Our Sages say, let him wait three days until his mind is rested, and then he shall pray.

Once again, this halakhah strongly suggests that Rambam conceived of prayer primarily as Divine service, rather than as a means of beseeching human needs. Otherwise, who more than one that is worried is likely to need to pray? Imagine a person accompanying a beloved parent or spouse or child, suffering some sudden, unexplained ailment, to the emergency room of a hospital. During those first crucial hours, while he observes alarming symptoms and is uncertain as to what is going on, surely that person will be troubled and agitated, and incapable of deep, calm, concentrated prayer focused upon the Divine alone? Yet is not that the very time he will most feel the need to pray, certainly in the sense of tehinah, petitionary prayer? All of which suggests that the focus of tefillah as discussed here is something else.

16. How is “intention” [achieved]? He should empty his heart from all thoughts and see himself as if he is standing before the Divine Presence. Therefore he must sit a bit before prayer so as to direct his heart, and thereafter he should pray, slowly and with supplication, and not treat his prayer as if he were carrying a burden that he throws off and goes on. Therefore he needs to sit a little while after prayer and then take his leave. The pious ones of old would wait an hour before prayer, and an hour after prayer, and pray for one hour.

Interestingly, Rambam is almost the only major medieval authority who actually rules that prayer recited without kavvanah must be repeated. The Shulhan Arukh (in wake of the Tur and Bet Yosef; see Orah Hayyim 101.1, Ram”a) rules that, even though in principle kavvanah is an essential, defining aspect of prayer, in practice we rule nowadays that if one prays without intention, one doesn’t repeat the prayer, because he is likely to pray without kavvanah the second time around as well. (A similar reversal occurs regarding the Mishnaic ruling that a bridegroom is exempt from the evening Shema on his wedding night because he will no doubt be preoccupied with other, more earthly thoughts, and to recite Shema at such a time would be taken as arrogance, as if to say that he is above such carnal thoughts—Mishnah Berakhot 2.5. In later halakhah not only was it permitted to recite Shema under such circumstances, but one is required to do so, because it’s presumptuous for one to act as if one would otherwise recite the Shema with such intense concentration—O.H. 70.3, and Mishnah Berurah ad loc., §xiv)