Children and Prayer - The Spiritual Laws of Prayer

On the Nature of Things

Our world is governed by the laws of nature, both physical and spiritual. On the physical side, everything seems simple: paper burns, wood does not sink, a stone falls downward, and so on.

The spiritual side of nature, however, is such that blessing comes into this world only through prayer.

There is a well-known commentary on the Book of Genesis, in its account of the six days of Creation. The world was created with everything we have now, with only one thing missing – rain. Rain is a blessing, and it could not enter our world until the Almighty created man and Adam HaRishon prayed for rain.

While living in this world, we must observe both its physical and spiritual laws.

That is why saying there is no point in doing anything because, even before a person is born, it has been decreed how many years they will live and how much sustenance they will receive from one Rosh Hashanah to the next is to misunderstand the nature of the world.

It is precisely in accordance with these laws that we must breathe, eat, and drink to sustain our physical lives, and turn to the Creator as often as possible to sustain our spiritual existence.

There is an interesting midrash about the Almighty speaking to Moses and commanding him to go to Pharaoh. Moses objected that, because he had difficulty speaking, sending such a representative of the holy people would bring disgrace upon the Almighty's Name.

The Almighty reassured Moses, saying that He determines who will speak and how. The Sages immediately raise a question: if He determines this, why did He not heal Moses?

The answer is clear from what we have written above, and this is what our commentators say: simply because Moses did not pray for it.

There are also many stories of how, after experiencing some event in life, one person returned to the Almighty and did teshuvah, while another remained nonreligious. One explanation for this phenomenon is that the person who did teshuvah was helped by the prayers of his ancestors, which seemed to have gone unanswered at the time but, in fact, played a decisive role in their descendant's beginning to observe the commandments!

to be continued

Prepared by A. Shvalb