What Happens When we Pray?

Nov 22

Friday night, November 22, 2019

Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA

This week I took a journey outside of my comfort zone.

I have been reaching out to leaders and representatives of different religious and ethnic communities around town, meeting with them about the Human Family Project. This is a network of communities, each of whom commits to meeting with and learning about other communities....especially those with whom they usually have little or no contact. This is our local attempt to reduce the levels of fear, distrust and polarization in our world. We’re calling it the Human Family Project.

So yesterday morning I went to visit with Tommy Schneider, Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel, the huge evangelical church downtown on Calle Cesar Chavez. I’ve heard about Calvary Chapel for years, and it has always made me nervous. The thought of several thousand Christians all fervently hoping and praying to convince us to become Christians is just unsettling. But I am more and more convinced that the people who make us uncomfortable are exactly the ones that we need to meet.

So I called and set up the meeting, and went down yesterday morning and met with the senior pastor, Tommy Schneider. It turns out he is a lovely, warm, thoughtful man. And we spent an hour together discussing how this might work. I especially appreciated the fact that he was thinking deeply and we were speaking honestly about the things that would make it difficult. And he said “I will have to pray about it.”

I’ve often heard religious Christians use the expression, “let me pray about it,” but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a traditional Jew use those words. From a Jew, one might expect to hear “let me think about it.” This evening I would like to reflect on the difference between “I will need to think about it” and “I will need to pray about it” and to consider whether we might have something to learn from our religious Christian neighbors.

To begin, let me share a story from this week’s Torah portion. Abraham’s wife Sarah has recently died at the age of 127. Her death sets Abraham thinking about the future, and about his son Isaac, who is still unmarried. Isaac needs a wife, but it has to be the right woman. Finding the right person to marry has always been a difficult, mysterious, often baffling process. And finding the right person for Isaac is no exception. Abraham sends his loyal servant Eliezer on a long journey, back to the land of Abraham’s birth, to find a wife for Isaac. Eliezer arrives in Aram Naharaim, the city of Abraham’s brother Nachor, and finds himself standing by a spring of water, where the women of the city come to fill their jugs at the end of the day. There, by the water flowing from the hillside, he prays.

He prays to God for a sign to help him identify the right woman to ask to come back with him, to leave her home and family, to marry Isaac and to be the next mother of the Jewish people. The idea comes to him as he is praying. “Here I am, standing by the spring of water, and the daughters of the city are coming out to draw water. When I ask one of them “may I have some water from your jug” if she says “here, drink, and let me give water to your camels also”...then I will know that she is the one.

Then the text says that before he has finished speaking, behold! Rebecca appears. Grand-daughter of Abraham’s brother Nachor, with her jug on her shoulder. And she is beautiful. She goes down to the spring, fills her jug, and comes back up. He runs over to her and asks “please, may I have a little water from your jug?” She replies “drink my lord.” And lowers her jugs quickly, and lets him drink. And after Eliezer drinks, she says “I will give water also to your camels.” He stands silently, full of wonder, watching her give water to the camels, still unsure whether God had made his mission successful, or not. In the end, he meets her family, and tells them his story, and they ask Rebecca if she will go with him, and she says “I will go.”

Eliezer’s prayer was answered, and I would like to know “what happened when he prayed? What is the difference between praying about something and thinking about it?

The story of Eliezer’s prayer and the discovery of Rebecca always makes me think of the night I wrote to Marian. I was twenty-nine years old and single, living in Santa Barbara. I had moved out from New York City one year earlier, and was lying in bed wondering if I would ever find the right person to marry. I had had several serious relationships in my life, but each one had ended, most of them badly, and I was feeling deeply discouraged. It seemed as though I was wandering, lost. I had lived in Boston, and Jerusalem and Los Angeles and New York City.....all large cities with thousands of single Jewish women, and I did not know how to know if a person was right for me to marry.

So here I was in Santa Barbara, not a big city, and without a large Jewish population and no single Jewish women who seemed even remotely right for me. I was deeply discouraged and lay in bed in the middle of the night, wondering if I would ever find the right person to marry. Then I asked....and I am still not sure who I asked.....maybe I asked myself, maybe I asked God: “If geography were not a factor, is there any woman, anywhere in the world, who I think is right for me?” and the answer came to me quite clearly “Marian.” I won’t take the time to tell you the whole story of our friendship, and the friendship of our parents, but Marian was a friend whom I liked a lot, whom I had first met in England when we were both 5 years old, and then met again in Rochester, and then seen in England, and then met in Israel, and most recently had seen in New York City. We knew each other, somewhat, but had never been romantically involved.

Her name and her face came to me so clearly that I got up in the middle of the night and wrote her a letter, reviewing the times we had been together and explaining that I thought we might be compatible and would she like to get together and see if we were. I went back to sleep, got up in the morning and re-read what I had written, decided I still believed everything in it and mailed it off and waited....for her to call, which she did, and we did, and I still look back on that night and wonder: “To whom did I ask that question?” I don’t think that lying there in bed that night I was thinking. That night I was praying. What happens when we pray?

The great medieval rabbi Maimonides teaches “how do you prepare for prayer? First empty your mind of all thoughts, and then ask....sincerely and wholeheartedly.” That is what happened inside me that night 33 and a half years ago. That is what Eliezer did, standing by the spring of water. That is what Pastor Tommy Schneider told me he would have to do before he could know how to work together with me on the Human Family.

Not think hard.

Not figure it out.

There are of course many times that thinking-- focused, disciplined, concentrated thinking-- is of immense importance. We need clarity and focus in confronting many of the problems and challenges that rise up before us as travel through the world. But there are certain questions to which the answer we seek will only come when we stop thinking, when we stop trying to figure the problem out. Knowing the right person to marry, or finding the right career path. Knowing how to be with a person who is dying, or how to manage our own emotions of anger or grief. Knowing how to be together, fearlessly and with integrity, with a fellow human being with a completely different world view. At these times it is best to find a quiet place, to become still and to empty our mind.... of every thought, of every argument. We empty our heart and our mind. Then, in simplicity and sincerity, we ask. We relax. We open ourselves to receive an answer.