In the second chapter of Pirkeh Avot, we read the following teaching of Rabbi Shimon:
וכשאתה מתפלל, אל תעש תפלתך קבע, אלא רחמים ותחנונים לפני המקום.
When you pray, do not make your prayer “permanent,” but rather compassion and pleading before G-d.
What does Rabbi Shimon mean when he warns us not to make our prayer “permanent”? And why does he refer to Hashem here as המקום – which literally means, “the place”?
Imagine there is somebody who wants to lose weight, so he approaches his friend who advises him to go to the gym. He explains to him which workouts he needs to do.
The fellow goes to the gym, does all the workouts, comes home, weighs himself…and sees that he weighs exactly the same. He goes over to his friend to complain. It didn’t work!
Quite obviously, he missed the point. The point is not to go to the gym just once. To lose weight, he needs to do this regularly. And then, slowly but surely, day by day, he gradually will lose the weight he wants to lose.
The same applies to tefilah. Sometimes we hear stories about how somebody needed something, prayed, and he got what he needed – and we are then disappointed when this doesn’t happen to us. These stories are inspiring and important reminders about the power of tefilah, but they miss the point. Tefilah is about putting in the work day in and day out. The Rabbis refer to prayer as עבודה – “work.” A person builds a career or a business day by day, going through the grind, consistently and persistently, putting in the work, getting a little bit better and moving the job or enterprise forward one small, slow step at a time.
This is what tefilah is all about. It’s about putting in the work, each day. Every time we pray, and we spend time thinking about Hashem and our relationship with Him, we grow just a little. We come just a little closer to Him. Our mindset is slightly enhanced. We become just a bit more focused on Him.
This analogy between tefilah and weight loss extends even further.
Just going to the gym isn’t enough. If a person goes and sits on the treadmill, nothing will happen. If he leans against the machines, he is not going to lose weight. He needs to put in the work.
This is true about prayer, too. If we don’t put any effort into our tefilah, it’s not going to do anything for us. We won’t accomplish anything. Sure, there are going to be days when praying is difficult, when we will be unable to concentrate. But we have to try to make these days the exception, rather than the rule. We need to put in the effort to try to understand the words, to try to focus on what we’re saying, to try to make the experience meaningful, and then it will have an impact.
Moreover, even if somebody goes to the gym regularly, and does an intense workout, he is not going to lose any weight if he comes home after each time and sits down with a box of cookies or large bag of potato chips. In order for the workout to have an effect, it needs to be carried over throughout the rest of his life.
This is true also about tefilah. Prayer will profoundly enhance our lives – but not if we leave it all behind once we leave the synagogue and head off to work or to wherever it is that we go. We need to apply the tefilah mindset to everything we do, to approach our whole lives from the perspective of emunah, of faith in Hashem and devotion to Him.
This is what Rabbi Shimon is telling us. If we want our tefilah to have an impact, we can’t approach is as קבע, as something routine that we go through by rote, without investing effort into it. We need to put in the work. We have to do the עבודה, concentrating to the best of our ability.
And this has to be done לפני המקום. Hashem is called המקום because He is in all places; He governs the entire world. We need to have our prayer affect המקום, all the “places” in our lives, all the various settings and situations that we find ourselves in, no matter what is going on in our lives, no matter what mood we are in, no matter what time of year it is or what we’re involved in.
Yes, it is a challenge – especially in today’s world, when we are so easily distracted and find it so difficult to concentrate on anything – to commit ourselves to praying. But once we recognize that tefilah is an עבודה, just like exercise, we will be better able to make this commitment, and we will then reap the priceless benefits and rewards which prayer offers us.