By Rabbi Carl M. Perkins:

True Prayers and False Prayers

Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5763 (2002)

One evening last June, I was on my way home from the annual meeting of the Bureau of Jewish Education. It was a nice evening, at which our Family Educator, Terri Swartz Russell, had received the Keter Torah Award for her creativity and commitment. It was late, sometime after 10 PM. Suddenly, a police car with its lights flashing overtook me on Central Avenue. Then, as I approached Marked Tree Road, I was forced to stop. A fire truck was barreling toward me and, as I screeched to a halt, it turned onto Central Avenue ahead of me. Once I’d regained my speed, within a few moments, I had to turn aside again as yet another police car, with lights flashing, overtook me. Three emergency vehicles! On a dark, quiet evening! In a secluded part of town! It worried me. It could be the synagogue, I thought. After all, how many homes are in this part of town? Comparatively few. But why would they be going to the Temple? No one would be there—it was too late for that. They’d only be going if there was a fire. Why would there be a fire? Only if there had been arson. I began to get really worried. Really nervous. I began to pray: I hope it’s not in the shul!

Then I wondered, well, what if it isn’t the synagogue? What if it’s in a private home? Then…..it could be mine! It could be my own home!

I caught myself praying: “I hope it’s not in my house!”

Just then, as I rounded a bend in the road, I saw the police cars and the fire engine ahead of me turn down Pine Street. “Whew,” I said, “It’s not the shul. It’s not in my house!”

I used the word, “praying” above, and yet, was I really praying? According to Jewish tradition, my “prayers” weren’t prayers at all. They weren’t real prayers; they were tefillot shav. Vain prayers, fake prayers!

What is a real prayer? And what is the difference between a real prayer and a phony prayer?

The Torah contains a tractate known as Berakhot, devoted almost entirely to the theory and practice of praying. The first few chapters describe the requirements for reciting the Shema, morning and evening. The next few chapters set forth the conditions under which one must recite the Amidah, three times a day. Then come a few chapters describing the familiar blessings that we are called upon to recite before and after eating.

Finally, there is the ninth and final chapter that describes what we are supposed to say when we encounter people or objects that are worthy of a response. For example, upon seeing the ocean, we thank God for creating it; if we come upon a striking mountain or river or desert, we thank God for “creating the works of creation,”—“oseh ma’asei b’reishit.”

We are also called upon to bless God for whatever happens. When something good happens, we say, “Blessed be the One who is good and who bestows good—Barukh ha-tov v’ha-meitiv.” When something evil befalls us, we say “Barukh Dayan ha-Emet, “Blessed be the True Judge.”

It may seem odd to invoke God’s name even when we receive bad news. It is odd. It doesn’t come naturally at all. And yet perhaps that is why we are bidden to do it. We are challenged to be aware that the world is not a magical place, in which good forces bring about happy outcomes, and evil forces bring about sad ones. We live in a world where sometimes, good things happen; and sometimes bad things happen. It’s one world, and God’s goodness, honesty and truth pervade it. That’s the world we live in. Despite the challenge of coping with the vicissitudes of life, we are called upon to strive to live up to our potential, to strive to be good—whatever happens, wherever we happen to be. And that’s why we acknowledge God even at the most difficult and painful moments in our lives.

Now, when we are children and we first experience bad news—and sometimes even as adults—we can’t believe it’s really true, and we imagine to ourselves—“Well, if God is really all-powerful, He/She should be able to reverse the course of nature and turn the clock back and make it all go away!”

But that’s when we come up against one of the most basic religious principles, namely, that the world moves in only one direction: forward and not backward. We can’t go back and re-live yesterday, no matter how hard we may want to. We can’t bring people back to life. We can’t go back to last year and sell our stock, or buy other stocks that, we’ve since learned, have done well. The world is lived only in the present, looking forward to the future.

“To cry over the past is to utter a vain prayer,” “ha-tzoek lishe-avar, harei zoh tefillat shav,” says the Talmud (B. Berachot 54a). The Talmud gives its own examples of this: “If a man’s wife is pregnant, and he says, “May God grant that it be a boy,” this is a vain prayer. If he is coming home from a journey [as I was just a few months ago] and he hears cries of distress—such as police sirens, or ambulance sirens—and he says, “May God grant that nothing bad is happening at my house,”—that’s a vain prayer.

We shouldn’t feel so terrible if we find ourselves, as I did, uttering vain prayers. It’s natural to want to say vain prayers. Yet that’s not what we are here to do this evening. That’s not what we are here to do tomorrow, nor throughout the Ten Days of Repentance that follow.

We are here to focus on what we can change, not what we cannot. We are here to focus on the future, as the arena in which we can demonstrate that we have learned from the past. We are here to pray for the strength to bear whatever burdens will come our way in the coming year, and the courage to behave properly, whatever the consequences.

It isn’t easy to pray in this way. It’s much easier to say, “I wish that what happened hadn’t happened.”

A few months ago, a new software program came to my attention. It’s a Siddur for the Palm Pilot. Now, that’s nothing new; I already have many of the prayers in the Siddur on my Palm Pilot. But this one had some unique features, one of which was a button that said, “Pray!” When you click on that button, the text automatically scrolls down the page, allowing you to daven without having to use your stylus.

It’s a neat feature, but I was disappointed by that word, “Pray” on the button. By clicking on that button, it implies that prayer follows automatically. But it doesn’t. It can’t. No machine can pray for us.

No one can pray for us. We have to do it ourselves.

This is the first evening that we’ll greet each other with the words “Shanah Tovah!” (“A Good Year!”) The word “Shanah” doesn’t only mean “year;” it comes from a root word in Hebrew that means “change.” That makes sense. The year to come will be different from this past year. That’s inevitable.

Let’s hope and pray that it will be different in a good way, and that we will be different in a good way. Shanah Tovah! May all of us be blessed with goodness in the coming year!

Amen.