Prayer Versus Accepting God’s Will

The Aish Rabbi Replies

Thank you for your profound question. Even though we do accept that God gives us what is right for us, there are three primary reasons why we still pray:

(1) Many of the blessings we deserve in life God does not grant to us automatically and immediately. We must first pray for them to receive them. Our prayers open up the gates of Heavens and bring down the blessings we deserve.

(2) Even if we do not deserve a certain blessing, the very fact that we are turning to God in prayer and asking Him for it might make us worthier and more deserving of it. Thus, our prayers may grant us more than we would otherwise deserve.

(3) A variation of this is that sometimes even with prayer we do not actually deserve a certain blessing. Even so, God may respond favorably to our prayers simply because we turned to Him and asked for it. This is something you might be familiar with if you have small children – or remember from being one yourself. Sometimes, parents would normally turn down a request from their child – yet they might say yes anyway “because you asked so nicely” – teaching their child just how admirable it is when he speaks nicely and places his trust in his parents. God too is our loving Parent who responds to our wishes and may go so far as to change our decree for the better because of our sincere prayers.

Thus, even though we always accept that God gives us what is right for us, we pray for our needs as well – sometimes because the blessings we deserve only come through prayer, and sometimes because our very prayers make us more worthy of further blessings. All the same, we do accept that God knows what is best for us. Thus, if our prayers are not answered in the way we would like, our reaction must be to accept that God knows best, and what we’re asking for is clearly not truly right for us. But of course – viewing the other side of the coin – perhaps our prayers were turned down only because we didn’t pray hard enough for what we wanted – or improve ourselves in other ways to be deserving of such blessing. Thus, although we accept that God knows best, we can and should continue to pray for that which we feel we need.

Of course, at a point, we should probably adopt more of an acceptance mindset rather than a prayer mindset. If after years of heartfelt prayer God still does not grant us the blessings we desire, we should probably focus more on accepting God’s will – that He knows that what we want is simply not right for us – rather than refusing to accept that and continuing to forcefully pray. In any event, if our prayers are turned down, our attitude must never be that God is ignoring us and is insensitive to our needs. We must always approach prayer with the frame of mind that God might be saying no only because He knows what we want is not truly best for us – and that may well be for reasons only He understands.

This also touches on another fundamental question. If God knows our needs – even better than we do ourselves – why does He want us to pray to Him at all? Why ask God for what we think we need – which in fact might be wrong? Why not just leave it entirely up to Him?

The answer in a word is because God wants our prayers. He wants us to talk to Him and ask Him for our needs – not just leave it up to Him and never communicate with Him. He also wants us to go through the internal process of deciding what we feel we need and understanding ourselves better. I discuss this in a different response. Please see here for a further discussion.

Here are also a few nice articles on the general concept of prayer:

https://aish.com/four-steps-to-effective-prayer/

https://aish.com/48965861/

https://aish.com/qa-what-is-the-purpose-of-prayer/

May God answer all your prayers for the good!