Introduction

27 minute read

Straightforward

5th July 2024

(!ed Entire Introduction chapter needs heavy rework)

Why do people pray?

There is a technical and legal basis for why we pray, which the Rambam and Ramban take different views on. But is that the answer to why people pray, or is it the answer to a different question: What technical legal obligation do you satisfy when you pray?

Most people familiar with these concepts probably don’t pray because of them.

Most Jewish people aren’t familiar with them at all.

And then, of course, there is the much broader and more obvious point to make, which is that prayer isn’t something exclusive to Jewish people or something that the Jews invented or that only Jews do.

Almost all people in all times and places have had a form of prayer, which opens the question up in a much more interesting way.

Why do people pray?

For most people, the answer is as simple as it is obvious.

It’s because we want things. We need things.

We pray because we recognize our lives are subject to forces and influences much, much bigger than us. At the heart of all prayer is the implicit acknowledgment that you are not in control of the universe, that it does not revolve around you, and that you are not God, because we recognize an outer boundary to our ability to realize the things we want that stops pretty close to the ends of our fingertips.

So we hope for the best, and we reach out.

Or, in other words, we pray. Prayer is the language we use to express our most urgent and essential desires. You don’t pray for lower taxes, you pray for your family’s wellbeing and security.

As the Izhbitzer notes, when you strip any external religious language and sentiment or imagery from it, humans actually pray all the time, even the most militant atheists.

Taking a very broad definition of the word for prayer, when you wish someone a nice day, isn’t that a kind of prayer, in which case, isn’t the world overflowing with prayers everywhere you look?

I hope he makes it in time, I hope it works out okay, and I hope she succeeds. When people wish you the best, hope for a good outcome, or wish each other good luck.

For the crops to grow, for the deal to work, the kid to recover, for the sickness to heal, the relationship to work out, the war to end.

They might not be praying to the right address, or to anything or anyone in particular, but we can easily recognize many of the elements of prayer without looking too hard at all.

These are basic needs that are constitutive of the human condition. That’s just what it means to be human; that’s how life is, and everyone has these experiences at different moments and in different doses.

That’s why humans pray, and that’s why humans have always prayed.

It’s why humans will always pray, even after being hurt and even after they have stopped believing.

Everyone, everywhere, has always understood that.

Everyone has hopes and dreams, whether articulated in speech or thought, and the universe participates in generating and receiving that information. Spiritual, religious, or agnostic, prayer in all its forms has emerged in separate and discrete instances across all cultures and civilizations going back into prehistoric times.

There are plenty of ways to get the execution wrong. When you count on the sun and rain for the crops, you might think you pray to the weather or the weather god.

The culture may favor cultic rituals or human sacrifice to the weather god. There are infinite variants on the execution; cultural context shapes, mediates, and expresses the phenomenological feeling of these expressions, but that’s a fancy way of saying that there is something deeply human about prayer, and the elements of prayer are consistnetly there.

Some cultural practices are qualitatively better or worse; a cult that requires a child or human sacrifice is disgraceful, prayer is clearly morally superior.

One of the clear success markers for Judaism is its reproducible outsized outcomes; something about Judaism’s ethics, legal discipline, and spiritual practices have enabled Jews to disproportionately contribute to every field of science, mathematics, literature, law, politics, finance, real estate, and technology and Jews have left a mark in every era of history, and especially in modern times.

One of the fatal mistakes of atheism and assimilation is throwing out behaviors, practices, structures, and traditions that don’t seem to make sense but were, in fact, load-bearing and are actually deeply constructive catalysts for developing the mind and spirit and facilitating the formation of meaningful experiences and identity.

Even for people for whom an uncritical acceptance of religious narratives and doctrines at face value falls short, there is deep wisdom in overcoming this disenchantment without returning to the uncritical stance of first naiveté but with a post-critical openness to its symbolic, metaphorical, and deeper spiritual meanings, allowing for a faith that is both intellectually robust and deeply meaningful.

There seems to be a biological component that generates cultural architecture, an emotional infrastructure for religion and metaphysics. We have mental receptors that bind to things; one of the great flaws of atheism is leaving that receptor unbound. Humans have a deep need for spirituality and meaning, in the absence of which we descend into nihilism and disorientation.

Humans need things.

Humans reach out beyond themselves and ask for help getting them.

And sometimes things work out.

When we pray, we all bring expectations to the table of how we think it works, or how we hope it works, or that it works it all.

There is a reason that humans have always prayed.

This book is about how the Jewish People pray, and in particular, the Amida, the most common and frequently recited prayer, said close to a thousand times per year by more observant Jews, in the form drafted by our sages, in the language of our ancestors, as prayed from Siberia to Spain and everywhere in between for generations untold going back thousands of years.

Although different customs give rise to small variances between the styles of Sefard and Ashkenaz, the received text of the Amida is so old that it predates our exile and any subsequent cultural differences; the variances across all texts are less than a single percentage point different.

Why do we live in a world where prayer is necessary?

Our sages teach that we live in a world of challenges and scarcity for good reason. If we all lived together happily in a utopia where all our needs were met, death and sickness were forgotten, and everyone lived in perfect mansions with perfect views on a miraculously terraformed Earth, and everything was perfect, it sounds wonderful, but there would be at least one problem with this utopia, the problem with any utopa. It’s so good that it’s boring and meaningless, where there is no function or merit to human effort and no possibility of individuality.

So, we live in a universe with scarcity and lack, which creates challenges and needs and the possibility of being able to dream and hope and work towards goals, which creates space for humans to pray.

But in the context of religion, faith is a natural consequence of professing to believe in God. If there is a Creator, there must be some kind of plan, and so the thinking goes, we should have faith in it. Faith means the notion of confidence or trust in a person, thing, or concept; in this case, the Creator – אמונה / בטחון.

Most people find prayer hard to relate to, especially if they pray regularly. It’s easy to do the action, but prayer happens in the heart and mind, so no one else can ever know if you ever really prayed.

Even with a translation, the underlying concepts are not necessarily so accessible, and there are many fundamental presumptions and questions embedded in prayer before ever saying a word, some of which include:

What is prayer?

If the Creator has a plan, why pray?

How might prayer influence or interact with the Creator?

Why is there any deficiency or lack or evil or suffering in the world for us to pray over?

What is the nature of the Creator?

What is the nature of the human relationship with the Creator?

What are we trying to accomplish with prayer?

What does prayer working or not working look like?

In the context of the Amidah prayer, some more key questions may include:

Why pray with language and words that aren’t our own?

What is the origin and historical development of the Amidah?

How does the Hebrew language and received text shape the meaning and our experience of the prayer?

And, of course, there are the intensely personal experiences we bring to our prayers:

Why does the Creator take a 39-year-old father and husband in a car accident?

Why did I lose my business?

Why did my friend lose a child?

It would be presumptuous to claim to have the answer to any of these questions, but these questions must be acknowledged to ground this project in the reality we inhabit. We live in a world of challenges and scarcity where we struggle and pray.

Some schools of thought believe that God only gives people challenges they can handle. But these are the sorts of challenges that break people; they aren’t okay, and it’s not because they weren’t strong enough, but because some challenges have the potential to wreck the human. Losing a child or surviving a concentration camp is exactly the kind of thing that breaks people, and there should be no judgment.

But then at the same time, consider all the examples of all the people who did walk out the concentration camp gates, and who refused to give up, who couragesuly committed to rebuilding again; they used profoundly negative formative experiences as catalysts for response. Although not everything can be a blessing, because some things are truly terrible, nothing is beyond being human rocket fuel, if we can get there. And that’s something prayer can help us with.

Too often, we act a certain way and say certain things because we’re supposed to. It can feel like we have a metastasized complacency about all the things we think we’re supposed to believe but don’t really align with how we feel if we let our minds wander out of permitted bounds. But it rings hollow, empty theatre we go through to be accepted as community members in good standing.

But if we were to acknowledge what our eyes tell us, we’d acknowledge that from the point of view of appearances, the universe doesn’t look or seem like a very fair place. As our sages put it, tzaddik v’ra lo; a question that is better than any answer and has stood the test of time. The fairness of existence is one of 13 principles of faith that there is a reward for doing good and punishment for evil; if it was a simple fact like the sky is blue, we wouldn’t have to work hard to believe it; it would just be true. Now, it might be true, and life might be fair, but that is not how reality presents and unfolds at all; how it looks and feels may be very different from how it is. We can believe that life is fair and good, but there is an infinite gap between the abstract fairness of all things and the real world we live in, where good people experience suffering.

Sometimes, there isn’t a happy ending. Sometimes, the good guy dies. We live in a world of challenges and scarcity where we struggle and pray.

Some schools of thought believe in a mechanistic, linear world; if this, then that. In this worldview, every dose of suffering is punishment for sin. But all you need is one counterexample to any conclusion and your conclusion is wrong; are there not a few good people everyone knows who suffer more than they deserve? Good things don’t just happen to good people, and bad things don’t just happen to good people; we live in a complex universe, a world of challenges and scarcity where we must struggle and pray.

For most normal people, there is an outer limit to an ideology of absolute faith or absolute gratitude. Thank you Hashem is powerful and important, and so is faith. But we live in a world of concentration camps and pediatric cancer wards, a world where bad things happen, where they happen a lot, and they happen to good people. The families associated with Camp Hasc and Camp Simcha are frequently some of the best people in the world; faith and gratitude don’t provide any explanatory value.

Frustratingly, some proponents suggest that you must negate yourself, that if you feel bad about something, it is because you have thoughts and feelings and desires, and that if you could be objective, you would let go of those attachments and be happy.

But our subjective lived experience is as humans living in bodies; it makes no sense to invalidate the entire experience for a perspective we cannot have. The subjective experience is all we know, and that’s the language of the question.

This work is grounded in the subjective human experience.

There might be a grand plan. But in the most purely practical and utilitarian sense, that is a useless idea, in the sense that what you can do with that idea is very little at all. You might believe in it and have faith in it; but you cannot access it or know it, and there is no point in pretending as if you can. And meanwhile, if you are a healthy human, there are things you care about and things that hurt you, so what is the correct way to act and behave in the world?

If you have questions and haven’t found a satisfying framework, this book might be for you.

This book is about how to pray in the world as it is, not how we wish it to be.

We live in a universe where, across large sample sizes, challenges and opportunities are probabilistically distributed, as confirmed by statistics.

It is not fair to say that all bad things that happen are punishments because what about one innocent child who suffered? It is far better to understand that our challenges are growth opportunities; and the most sophisticated understanding is that we live in a world where bad things happen for reasons we cannot understand, but the best thing we can do is introspect and do teshuva and use them as a growth opportunity.

As much as we say we believe in free will, we don’t get to choose most of the things that are hugely determinative in the people we become. You don’t always get to choose reality; God chooses most of the inputs. But you get to choose how to respond. Our challenges are prompts to respond to that redirect our lives. Difficulty is not an interruption to spiritual growth; it is the very site of spiritual growth. How will we respond? You are responsible for your output, not your outcome. You have to try, you are responsible for the how and why.

There is no glory in suffering, no heroism in pain or misery. But frequently, in retrospect, people say that the period of struggle is the most beautiful because it is formative; there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential for us to know the night. You can’t really begin to appreciate life until it has knocked you down a few times. You can’t really begin to appreciate love until your heart has been broken. And you can’t really begin to appreciate happiness until you’ve known sadness. Once you’ve walked through the valley, the view from the mountaintop is breathtaking.

We live in a world of challenges and scarcity where we struggle and pray. People who have lived a charmed life have not really experienced the full range of life.

But the only challenges we face are those that life has thrown at us, then we are merely living life in reaction only – we are not pushing ourselves and directing our own destiny. Our greatest challenges should be those we give ourselves to reach our full potential.

Our choices, what we struggle towards, what we hope and pray for, makes all the difference in the world.

Does prayer work?

It’s an important question, but if we were to begin to answer, is the data something that we could measure?

There’s a classic joke about a great flood, and the government announces an evacuation, but a priest stays put, and the waters reach the top of his home. The priest climbs to the roof, and a neighbor with a boat comes by and says, “Hop on! I’ll take you to safety.” The priest replied, “Thank you, no need. The Lord will save me.” Then, the water reaches his waist when an army helicopter comes by and drops a ladder. The priest shouts up, “No, no, the Lord will save me.” Finally, the water goes over his head, and he paddles to the surface. A disaster relief boat comes by and offers to bring the priest to safety. Once again, he declined, “No, no, the Lord will save me.” The priest paddles until he is exhausted, and he drowns and dies. He reaches the gates of Heaven, puzzled, and asks God, “Lord, why didn’t you save me?” only for God to smile, “My guy, I sent you an evacuation notice, two boats, and a helicopter!”

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks told of the time he and the Archbishop of Canterbury had just been chosen for their respective positions, and neither had yet taken up office. Someone discovered that we were both passionate Arsenal Football Club supporters and were invited to attend a game at Highbury Stadium.

The great night came, and they were warmly received, taken down to meet the directors, and then led out onto the floodlit pitch itself, where they presented a cheque to charity. The loudspeakers announced their presence to the crowd, and a great cheer went up. Whichever direction Arsenal supporters believed, that night, they had friends in high places. If the power of prayer counted, Arsenal could not possibly lose.

That night, Arsenal went down to their worst home defeat in 63 years, losing 6-2 to Manchester United. The next day, a national newspaper carried the story concluded: “If the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi between them cannot bring about a win for Arsenal, does this not finally prove that God does not exist!” The day after, Rabbi Sacks sent a letter to the editor with the following reply: “To the contrary, what it proves is that God exists. It’s just that He supports Manchester United.”

Beneath these lighthearted anecdotes is the beginning of an answer to whether or how prayer might work. It would not be correct to measure the efficacy of prayer by praying for a specific outcome and then measuring the frequency of that outcome; that’s not how the universe operates.

We are not well placed to determine if our prayers have been answered because the universe unfolds in infinite ways, not just the ways you want it to.

As one thinker put it, the function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays. It’s much less about what God needs to do for us, and much more about what we need to do for God. Imitating the Creator’s ways means to manifest and participate in some small way in God’s qualities, acting in alignment with our best understanding of what is right and proper, and giving what is good and true serious consideration.

Prayer is a form of meditation or mindfulness protocol; people have been engaging in forms of mindful activity from time immemorial into the present day. Many high-performing people in our time in the world of technology and finance are making a positive impact in the world by implementing a form of prayer or meditation protocol in their lives. Ongoing studies on practices of mindfulness and meditation show that it can be beneficial for your health and your brain, and can even change your brain chemistry. Prayer and meditation are rooted in similar practices; the prophets tended to be shepherds who spent a lot of time in the wilderness alone, quieting their minds and opening themselves to the universe. Said differently, that’s a lot like the practices we would call prayer and meditation today.

One of the touchpoints in which prayer becomes part of the discourse in the modern West is in the ugly shadow of school shootings in the United States; a common refrain calls for thoughts and prayers, and a common rebuttal rejects these thoughts and prayers as empty platitudes and instead calls for different policies as the solution. Now, the external world of action requires a practical approach to problem-solving. Prayer alone isn’t enough.

But prayer also does something; in a world where everyone truly, deeply, mindfully, and thoughtfully prayed would be a radically different world both culturally and spiritually, and school shootings, terrorism, and war would not be things that happen. In a certain sense, this transformation is one of the ultimate promises of the age of Mashiach.

Prayer isn’t reciting words; it’s not a ritual.

It takes a deliberate and disciplined effort to build a practice of prayer and meditation; it’s not an ability, it is a skill that must be cultivated, developed, honed, learned, and trained. You have to set aside time in your life regularly; it isn’t the kind of thing that lends itself to a one-off exchange about the one thing you finally recognize is out of your control and need a good outcome for, that’s not what prayer is.

Prayer is the language of hope, the way in which we articulate and express our deepest and most urgent needs and desires. It transforms a belief, cause, dream, or feeling into an existential spiritual need.

(importance of hope, place of hope in the world)

(importance of action)

Prayer must be accompanied by actions that align with the hope that our prayers will be answered.

There’s an old story about a group of Jews who gathered in Jerusalem to pray for rain during a drought. As they fervently prayed, a child innocently looked up at everyone and asked, “How come nobody brought an umbrella?”

We aren’t well positioned to measure what a “successful” prayer looks like, because we experience one outcome out of the many that could have unfolded, and we experience time one moment at a time; life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.

While the plural of anecdote is not data, an enormous amount of humans, living and dead, have seen and believed in the power of prayer.

Maybe you need to let go of your expectations of a particular outcome. Maybe you need to broaden your definition what prayer working looks like.

If someone loses their job and prays for the Creator to provide, the universe could unfold in an infinite number of ways, any one of which could conceivably and plausibly be seen as an answer to your prayers:

Is succeeding at a job interview the Creator answering?
Is failing a job interview the Creator leading you elsewhere?
Is failing to land job interviews the Creator teaching you patience and persistence?
Is getting a job that pays more the Creator blessing you?
Is getting a job that pays less the Creator teaching you to appreciate what you have, and teaching you to be frugal?
Is getting a job with an awesome boss a sign from the Creator we are in the right place?
Is getting a job with a lousy boss the Creator teaching you to operate under difficult leadership

If someone goes a long period of time without finding a job:

Is there something you’re doing wrong that the Creator is giving you space to notice and fix?
Are you doing everything right, and you have to work on your patience, faith, and trust?
Or is the Creator telling us that you aren’t looking in the right places and should consider another city, industry, or career?

In the moment someone loses their job, and almost every moment like it, it is completely impossible to anticipate what the answer to your prayers looks like.

But there is one common to making prayers come true.

(!ed Shlomo – This section or an additional needs classical and contemporary approaches to how prayer might work and what it might accomplish for us)

You might have come to the right place

Many people don’t pray. Many who pray can’t read Hebrew. Many who pray in Hebrew don’t understand the words. Many who pray in Hebrew and understand the words still find it challenging to relate to anything past the plain meaning of the words, especially for a prayer they’ve said hundreds or thousands of times.

To be sure, understanding the plain meaning of the words alone is itself an achievement, and there are plenty of useful translations in any number of languages to help you get there.

But in case you’re looking for something more, you might have come to the right place. There isn’t one way to understand most things; our sages teach that there are seventy faces to the Torah, a way of acknowledging that there are multiple interpretations of something. Some interpretations are incompatible and mutually exclusive, but that doesn’t make them wrong; it’s just about finding the ones that make sense to you.

Prayer should not be robotic; one of the prophets’ great criticisms was to people who worshipped God daily, mechanistically, performing empty rituals of habit, with no conscious engagement beneath the surface of their actions.

This book exists to help people find ways to infuse life and spirit into their prayers in ways that resonate with the world as it seems.

Some parts are easy to explain and easy to understand.

In the prayer for good health and the health of the people we love, it’s not hard to take that deeply seriously, and we certainly don’t need to let our imaginations run wild to approach it with gravity and humility.

In the blessing for business and personal finances, we need no help understanding the importance of financial well-being. Who doesn’t worry about bills and job security? What if the market turns, or the big client leaves or your big project turns out disastrously?

We recognize these feelings from our daily experience; it’s not hard to mean those words.

But many other blessings can be pretty remote and inaccessible, articulating abstract ideas and concepts. One goal of this project is to make those understandable and relevant.

Many works are top-down, explaining the metaphysics of reality and how the right combinations of letters and words of prayer unlock the treasure chests of bounty—isarusa d’leila milmala l’mata. Some take the approach that everything bad that happens is punishment for our sins.

This book is not of of them.

This work is grounded in the subjective human experience.

If you have questions and haven’t found a satisfying framework, this book might be for you.

Connecting the dots

As our story unfolds, prayer plays a crucial role in connecting the dots, considering where we have been, where we are, and where we might yet be going. What do you want from life, why do you want it, should you want it?

This requires grounding, honesty, and humility; remember what you have control over (what you do tomorrow morning, your career, lunch, who to form relationships with) and what you don’t (death, hurricanes, most other things).

Who do you need to become to get the life you ultimately want? Part of prayer is pausing to think. Look at people who have what you want and look deeply at who they are and the consistent actions they take, and ask yourself again who you need to become to get the life you want. Without this component, prayers are literally just wishful thinking. Maybe wishful thinking works sometimes, but those stories are one in a million, and it might just be variance. Don’t count on luck.

Don’t just pray for the opportunity; pray for the ability to execute so you don’t fumble the ball when it’s handed off to you. “There’s a plan” is for when someone’s story ends. For those of us still in the middle, it’s a prompt. What is the plan? It is still unfolding, so how will we respond?

We need to moderate our expectations of prayer. God does not conform to our timescale or standards of justice. God is just and fair, but it certainly might not seem that way, it doesn’t have to. The universe is much bigger than any of us.

Our prayers and our lives are expressions of free will and are counter-deterministic. The future is fluid, not fixed. Whatever unfathomable plan there is, it is not unchangeable, and as the universe unfolds in its infinity, that plan can have contingencies; as we so prominently declare on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and as the TTorah’sstories of Avraham, Moshe teach us, the Creator can change His mind. Prayer includes simply talking to the Creator and baring your soul in intimacy with the Creator. It includes checking in and communing with our third parent.

The very simple and demonstrable reality is that people who have been empty or finished or low or exhausted have prayed for guidance and strength and found it. People who have been immersed in grief have prayed for comfort and happiness and discovered it once more.

I am not writing to present the truth, or the perfect explanation. I write to evoke something in you. You can take or leave as much as you like. I write for anybody to understand, but not everybody is my audience.

My goal has been and remains to write something timeless and relevant, because while I could not care less about what you ought to think, I care deeply about speaking to how you truly feel.

Storytelling

Humans love stories; we spend a significant amount of time immersed in them. The Torah’s stories captivate us from childhood for life. But much as we enjoy and are inspired by the countless stories we’ve experienced through various media, they are different from reality. They are different not in the sense that they take place in imaginary worlds or are filled with fantastical elements, but that at their most fundamental level, there exists a dissonance between the way stories are structured and the way we experience our own lives.

Every story, by definition, has a structured arc, shape, or format with a beginning, middle, and end. The protagonist starts out in the ordinary world, sets out into the unknown, encounters specific characters, faces a crisis, and eventually returns as a changed person. Even in this brief summary, we can immediately see the dissonance with our own lives. Whereas the hero’s journey is clearly structured, our own can often feel messy and chaotic. Whereas the hero encounters events and characters that are purposeful to the larger adventure, our own experiences often feel incidental and lacking in tangible meaning. And whereas the hero almost always has a transformative arc, we ourselves do not walk such defined paths.

Knowing how most popular stories play out according to similar structural foundations, we can begin to understand why they are so fundamentally different from reality. It is a form of determinism present in most stories. Outside of fiction, even in the biographies of historic people; musicians who after a long struggle became world-famous, billionaires who started out in their garages or dorm rooms. Everyone who achieved or experienced something extraordinary enough that we are now retelling their tales. Can it be said of all these characters that they were destined to go on hero’s journeys? That they were never as ordinary as they appeared?

In a way, yes. While none of these characters were explicitly destined for a greater purpose, it is the very structure of the story, and by extension, the act of retelling it, that grants them this purpose anyway. All stories are essentially told backwards by their very nature. They are told already knowing where they are going to go. As such, the end is always built into the beginning. And as a consequence, the beginning and the journey that follows are always made up of selected parts that are directly meaningful to the end. It is why everything we see the hero do is filled with promise and purpose. And why we rarely see them spend a lot of time doing uninteresting, ordinary, everyday things like eating, folding laundry, or filling out tax forms. It is also why the hero never does something awkward that significantly stumbles the journey; the soldier never sprains his ankle and has to sit out the big battle, nor does the boxer get onset diarrhea just before the climactic fight.

The famous literary principle of Chekhov’s Gun, for example, states that every element in a story must be significant; that if you present a rifle hanging on the wall, it has to go off at some point. Again, the end is built into the beginning. For unlike an actual gun, Chekhov’s gun exists with an innate destiny. Stories, unlike our own lives, unfold according to an archetypal structure in which every character trait that we’re shown, every effort that is made, every event that is experienced, every victory, every defeat, every step along the way, tends to be imbued with an inherent sense of purpose. We can also see what makes them so appealing. It’s obviously comforting to believe that our lives too are ordered according to meaningful principles, that everything we do is significant to a greater purpose, and that it will all work out in the end.

But stories are ordered from the beginning in a way that we can only do by virtue of hindsight, by looking back afterwards and trying to make sense of everything that came prior. Therefore, when we recount our own lives as stories, as we so often tend to do, we are basically fictionalizing what really was. Take historical biographies, for example. Here it becomes especially clear that people’s lives are never retold as they truly were. In fact, events are often misrepresented, shuffled around, or made up altogether to ensure that every part of the story becomes directly meaningful and purposeful to the greater end. It is why many biographies tend to feel the same, even though the real-life stories are all unique and are often barely comparable to each other.

It is also the reason that we can now look at certain historical figures and say that they were indeed born to do what they do, that they were made for greatness, or that they were doomed for tragedy. All this is not to diminish or undermine any real-life accomplishments, but the point is that when we retell these stories, we fundamentally separate them from reality. And because of this, we tend to mistakenly create the illusion that whatever goal was achieved, whatever outcome materialized, was already, in a way, destined from the start. And that everything along the way was directly meaningful to this end.

This, of course, is not how we experience our own lives. We live looking forward without knowing what end, if any, is built into our actions. We can act with a certain goal in mind, but we never have the security that the actions we take towards that goal will actually bring us closer to it. Even if there is a pre-determined meaning to what we do, we don’t have access to it until we are once again looking backwards.

The fundamental difference between stories and reality is that stories are always made up of meaningful elements. They are always constructed in hindsight by a storyteller who uses this vantage point to give order and significance to disconnected parts until they form a cohesive whole. We all have dreams. We see others achieve them and believe that if we follow their lead, we can do the same. Whether it’s in business, family, experiences, or anything really, we believe that if we just play the act, we are guaranteed to experience the same story. To be clear, it is not that all these things can’t happen, it’s just that they are not guaranteed to happen as they are in stories. Your business may fail before even taking off. The amazing journey you go on might be disappointing and not at all like you expected. And being a perfect romantic doesn’t guarantee a successful romance as the other person might simply not like you back.

Especially when it comes to the bigger goals that so many people dream of—becoming the next billionaire, a blockbuster filmmaker, or a world-famous artist—they’re not even remotely likely to happen. And yet, because stories show those adventures as so relatable, as so accessible for everyone, a part of us still clings to that secret little voice telling us: ‘Of course it doesn’t happen for most people, but it might happen for me. I’m not like everyone else, my story is different. I am meant to do this.’ And the thing is, it is hard to argue against this. Because again, it is technically not impossible. But this is also kind of the point. We can’t know how our lives will turn out. And by believing in all the heroic adventures telling us that we can, we simplify an endlessly complex reality that does not unfold according to those structures. We create an illusion; the false belief that there are specific steps that will lead to a pre-determined goal. And by assuming these unrealistic expectations, by assuming that our lives unfold according to a simple plot, to but a handful of variables, we are bound to set ourselves up for disappointment.

Just imagine how many people dropped out of college to become the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, how many people recklessly moved to Los Angeles to become the next superstar, how many people believed that, as long as they followed the steps of the hero’s journey, they would surely make it? And for how many did it actually pan out the way they envisioned it? Furthermore, when we reduce reality to the simplified structures of heroic adventures, we also tend to focus only on those elements that are within our control. On things like willpower, discipline, and perseverance. Once again, all important qualities that are hard to argue against. But what is especially insidious about this focus on individual agency is that whether or not you will get to live out your hero’s journey becomes solely determined by personal responsibility. But there’s so much more that’s not in your control.

As the existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said: life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards. As such, no matter how you look at it, our experiences always have a two-fold significance. First, there is the initial experience of something; the strangeness of an unfamiliar event, the excitement of meeting someone new, or the pain following a failure. And then there’s the meaning that those experiences take on as we retell them in a story, which has the power to change how we initially perceived them. For example, the once admirable ambition of a partner might be recontextualized as selfish egoism as the relationship falls apart into tragedy. Or the initial failure might become the stepping stone to a more meaningful victory, and the story a triumphant ending after all.

Here too we see the elements of story structure also have a double significance; there is the event in itself, and there is the larger meaning of that event as it becomes recontextualized in the story as a whole. The only thing is, when it comes to the stories of our own lives, we are both author and character. In other words, we are telling our stories as we are living them, and it is here where prayer can serve a particularly profound role in helping us make sense of our lives. Because while the potential for stories is limitless, so is the potential to reframe that which is constantly capable of evolving.

Just look at how often we believe that we are at the start of a grand adventure, only for it to become something that just happened, and then passed without any discernible consequences? Or on the contrary, how often have we made life-changing decisions that seemed so minuscule at the moment that we didn’t realize their importance until decades later? And even then, can we truly trace those decisions back to their source? Are the choices we make not tied to countless invisible threads? Threads that have been unfolding and spinning around since long before we were born? The same can be asked when it comes to our collective adventures: when does a war begin? Is it the moment it is declared? Or is that just a consequence of a story that had already begun much earlier? What is the history of a nation? A people? Where does our story begin? And, just as important, where does it end?

What is often missing from our stories, as opposed to adventures in stories, is perfect moments; moments that mark definitive resolutions in our stories, and we see them in the form of plot twists; moments in which seemingly unconnected threads are suddenly revealed to be intertwined, in which chaos and confusion are suddenly replaced with order and understanding. Moments in which it all comes together. In real life, large-scale conflicts, personal relations, and quests for meaning are rarely defined or bookended by singular moments, especially ones that we experience as such while they are happening. When it comes to historical conflicts, we can define certain milestones in hindsight, the day of surrender, the signing of a declaration, but for those who have actually lived the story, it’s probably hard to pinpoint the exact moment they felt things were back to normal.

COVID wasn’t over with one defining victory, after one clearly perceivable moment, but was resolved with a slow, almost inconspicuous return to a more ordinary world. Looking at our relationships, here too we will surely find important moments, the first date, the wedding day, and other moments of great personal significance. But again, these are almost never truly as definitive as the majority of stories in various media. The reality of almost everything in real life is that nothing can be taken for granted, in which every experienced moment can be redefined, or even fall apart.

We may create some understanding of things over time but, what is this really if not just a temporary veil of wisdom over what remains a fundamentally unknowable reality, a brief moment of stillness in what remains an ever-changing story? The Torah is a story; the story of Creation and the Jewish People. It is also the blueprint of the Creation and gives Creation the intentionality, structure, and definitiveness of a story, and our lives are small but purposeful threads on the infinite tapestry that is still being crafted.

There may be some kind of divine plan, but we cannot access it to guide our actions, behaviors, choices, and story. So in actuality, we can let go of the idea of coherent pre-determined structures entirely, in favor of creativity. We can take our story into our own hands and become our own authors. If we truly become the authors of our own lives, the adventure could mean to try and be someone new. To become who we would otherwise never dare to be. To break away from the patterns and norms that kept us in place, that kept us small.

Life is full of conflicts, limitations, and contradictions. But there’s also a freedom, or at least, a feeling of freedom within us. Although it is not the kind of freedom that allows us to transcend the absurdity of existence, it is one that allows us to shape our experience of it. It is the part of us that realizes we will never truly understand our grand cosmic purpose, that accepts it is, for all practical purposes, meaningless. But it is also the part that then sees a sunset, or a smile, a tiny glimpse of something beautiful, and feels that it is not.

It is, however, not a matter of rationality or logic, it’s something deeper. It is the part of us that doesn’t just want to exist, it wants us to live. It is the part that tells us that if I have to create my own meaning, I’m going to create as much of it as I can. If I have to tell my own story, I’m going to fill it with beauty. It is the part of us that wants to savor every moment, be it exciting and adventurous, or quiet and mundane. That wants to experience life, all of it, with passion, with intensity.

Perhaps this is why we turn to the same stories. To help give shape to our own, to enrich them. To deepen our capacity to experience the beauty around us. To give us courage and strength. To prepare us for the hardship, the suffering and loss. After all, that’s the only journey that’s shared between all of us. The struggle that we all have in common. An effort that is nothing short of heroic. What that should do is connect us to each other. To make us compassionate, and patient, and supportive towards our fellow human beings following the same journey.

If we let go of all the ideas of who we should be, and instead focus on who we can be, who we want to be, it can truly be a wonderful life. Because by embracing ourselves as storytellers, but letting go of the structures that demand cohesion and limit our creativity, what we would be left with is freedom, for ourselves, and for others. Freedom to break free. Freedom to be.