Tefillah and Brick Walls

Sometimes if it feels as if you’re davening and davening and nothing’s changing. There was a period this year when I was so sure my yeshua had to be just around the corner, I had been davening with a lot of intensity, and feeling like maybe there was a breakthrough. But nothing changed, as far as I could see from the outside.

 

I spoke to Mrs. M’nucha Bialik about this feeling, and she directed me to listen to this story. Though I had heard it years back, I never really understood the message until now. If you’ve never listened, here it is in a nutshell: Rabbi Leib Keleman had a newborn son with a serious heart condition. He and his wife ran a wild race against time to fly the baby from E”Y to L.A. for a surgery. The story of what happened to get the baby there in time is the most miraculous, unbelievable thing you’ll ever hear (really, it’s a must-listen). But at one point during the wild chain of events, Rabbi Keleman stepped aside to daven shacharis in the hospital lobby. This is what he experienced (at :49-:52): “…it was the most unusual tefillah I had ever had…I stepped up to the wall and I just started praying, ‘G-d, save my kid. Please.’ And it was the first time ever in my life that I had absolute and total clarity…that there was no one listening…It was the first time I realized I had been completely abandoned. If there was a G-d, He wasn’t there listening to my prayers, I was totally alone; it was a palpable feeling of complete abandonment.” He was in total despair, but there was nothing he could do to shake the feeling.

 

Immediately thereafter, the plans came together to get the baby on a plane to America, where he had the necessary surgery and recovered. So had Rabbi Keleman truly been abandoned in his time of greatest need? Of course not. What, then, was behind that “palpable feeling of complete abandonment”? Rabbi Keleman went to speak with his rebbe, who I believe was Rav Wolbe zt”l, and his rebbe told him (at 1:16): “G-d hides so that we’ll know that we should do kindness quietly…When an omnipotent G-d tries to hide, He can do a very good job. Sometimes in this world, the reality of G-d’s existence is silence, and that’s what you experienced…[but] you saw, you heard, you experienced it–while you were so panicked that you were feeling all alone, G-d was taking care of the arrangements.”

 

Often, Hashem chooses to deal with us through hester panim (concealment). It is such a deep way of relating to us because it challenges us to push through the darkness and to believe that just because it feels like we are trapped behind a wall with no one listening to us, we never really are. The experience of davening without feeling heard is a major nisayon.

 

We never know what is going on behind the “wall” or why some people’s tefillos seem to be answered so quickly and other people have to daven many tefillos before things appear to change. What we do know is that “Hakodosh Boruch Hu mis’aveh l’tefillasan shel tzaddikim” — Hashem desires the tefillos of righteous people, and that is why our Imahos had to daven for many years to have children. Maybe some people need to fill a pail with tefillos, and other people have to fill the Grand Canyon. We don’t understand why, but we can be sure that if Hashem wants someone to daven many tefillos, their tefillos are extra-special. And we can be doubly sure that no tefillah is ever wasted or forgotten.

 

When Hashem created the vegetation to cover the earth, He didn’t make anything sprout. It all waited just beneath the surface, ready to come up as soon as the rain fell. But the rain didn’t come until Adam was created and davened for it to come. And when he davened and the rain fell, all the greenery broke through the surface and the earth was covered in it. It was waiting just beneath the surface all along.

 

Everything good that Hashem wants to give us is waiting just beneath the surface, for the right time, the right place, the right constellation of events and people and things to be in place. And for the right tefillah. Let’s daven and not give up. Hashem is listening.