CHAYE SARA: How Did Abraham Discover Prayer?

ONE CREATOR

Abraham Abinu discovered God by observing Creation. “There must be an Intelligent Creator,” Abraham reasoned, Someone who brought this wonderful world into existence (yesh adon labira). This idea, already very innovative, was followed by an even more revolutionary declaration: “There is only one God.” Against all the polytheistic logic of his time, Abraham affirmed that opposing natural forces do not reflect gods fighting one another. For Abraham, light and darkness, health and sickness, life and death all come from the same Source. In those days, believing in one God was not reasonable. It was madness, because it seemed illogical that sickness and healing could come from the same God. And on top of that, believing in one God was an insult to all the other gods, because monotheism does not merely say there is a God. It says there is “only one” God. Therefore, every other god is false.

GOD IS INVISIBLE

And as if that were not enough, Abraham also believed and taught that God cannot be seen. That He has no body. That He is invisible. This was perhaps the most dramatic and controversial claim of all.

Today we understand God’s invisibility without any trouble. We know, for example, that radio waves, microwaves, WiFi and cellular signals are extremely powerful forms of energy, and invisible to our eyes. Many things we cannot see, perhaps most of what exists, are in a dimension our eyes cannot perceive.

But 4,000 years ago, who would believe in something that could not be seen, touched or represented? Who would accept that something, or someone, invisible is responsible for the existence of everything visible? I would say this was the most spectacular innovation of Abraham’s monotheism, and the hardest idea for others to accept.

HE LISTENS BECAUSE HE CARES

But there is one aspect of Jewish monotheism (or Jewish theology) that, according to the literal reading of the biblical text (peshat), Abraham Abinu discovered only over time: that the Creator cares about human beings, that He is concerned with us, that He intervenes in our lives, and that He can even change the natural course of events when we ask Him to.

It is as if, at the beginning, Abraham was not fully aware of this, and that is why he never prayed when he needed Divine intervention. For example: Abraham leaves the comfortable life of Haran. He emigrates to Israel, and when he arrives, the land he settles in suffers a severe drought; he decides to go down to Egypt, and there his wife Sara is kidnapped. In neither case does Abraham say a prayer. He does not ask God for the blessing of rain in Canaan, and he does not plead for Sara’s release in Egypt. Why?

SUFFERING WITHOUT PRAYING

The silence of the text seems to indicate that Abraham never imagined God would listen to a human being in need, and would be willing to intervene and change a natural or personal event in order to help him. Put yourself in the context of Abraham’s generation. Pagans did not expect the gods to care about humans. First, because the gods were always busy with their own affairs, usually fighting one another. And if someone did need something from the gods, rain or a victory, the relationship was transactional. To benefit humans with their powers, the gods demanded something in return: gifts or sacrifices. If it suited them, they were willing to help; otherwise, they had no interest in human beings. On the contrary, they sometimes competed with humans for natural resources such as rain, light, or even women. In the middle of a pagan society, praying, that is, “asking the gods for a favor,” was completely counterintuitive. So Abraham could not deduce, by observation or intelligence alone, that God would want to listen to him and help him “out of love.” Abraham had to be taught by God to pray.

THE BEGINNING OF PRAYER

Following the literal sense of the text strictly, it is God who first mentions the concept of prayer (lehitpalel) in the Bible. When? When Sara was kidnapped a second time, this time by Abimelekh, the king of Gerar, God punished the king with severe afflictions and appeared to him in a dream. There God tells the king that Sara is a married woman. Abimelekh answers that he did not know, and then God tells the king what to do (Bereshit 20:7): “Now return the woman to her husband, for he is a prophet [that is, he can communicate with God], and [ask him to] pray for you, and you will live.”

Abimelekh must have passed this Divine message on to Abraham, because immediately, and for the first time, we read (20:17): “Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelekh.”

This is the first formal prayer in the Torah.

Before this, Abraham invoked God’s name (vayikra beshem HaShem; nebarekh sheakhalnu mishelo; tiken tefilat Shacharit, etc.) to acknowledge God, to thank Him and to announce His existence to the world. He even “questioned” Divine justice and “negotiated” for the lives of the righteous of Sedom. But technically, that was not a prayer.

God taught Abraham to pray, just as, in due time, He would teach Moshe to pray the 13 middot of compassion to invoke Divine forgiveness.

Abraham then learned that he could pray, ask HaShem for help, and expect God to intervene, for example, in healing a human being, like Abimelekh.

APPRECIATING TEFILA

We are already used to the idea of praying, and it seems natural to us that God listens. But that the Creator of the universe should listen to human prayers is not something we should take for granted. Tefila, knowing that God hears us and that we matter to Him, is an incredible privilege, a gift we receive because the Creator loves us as a father loves his children.

Abraham and his descendants learned this lesson very quickly.

In this week’s Parasha, Chaye Sara, we find Eliezer, Abraham’s servant and disciple, praying and asking the Creator’s help to find a suitable wife for Yitschak.

Later we see Yitschak praying for a son.

Then we find Yaakob praying for Divine protection.

And the rest is history…

Rabbi Yosef Bitton