Prayer

Back in my yeshiva days, I struggled with the concept of prayer. We observe that sometimes people pray for things and aren’t answered - after all, we all pray every day for health, wealth and the ultimate redemption. So the underlying theory seems to be something along the lines of prayer increasing your odds. Or, since presumably these things are deterministic, your score: perhaps a young, healthy person needs 100 points to recover from an illness, and has 80 points on their own merit, prayer can boost them 20 points and make it happen. Perhaps to recover from a rare cancer requires 10,000 points and so even a pretty righteous person, with many people praying for them, might get like, 8,000 points, close but no cigar. (Perhaps this even warrants them a temporary remission, but not a full one.)

But all of this seems a little silly: the “vending machine” model of divine worship. Insert prayers, get rewarded. In fact there are Jewish sources that claim that God makes life especially tough for the righteous because he desires their prayers. A model that appeals to me more would be the exact opposite: that prayer affects nothing at all, but is a form of meditation and Divine closeness, and so is worthy for its own sake. But in this case praying for something to happen does absolutely nothing, which makes the activity seem somewhat paradoxical.

Of course, at its core this is entangled with the problem of theodicy, so it’s no wonder that it’s such a conundrum.