Prayer: Law and Spirit Section 1: The Obligation to Pray

(23) When My angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I annihilate them, (24) you shall not bow down to their gods in worship or follow their practices, but shall tear them down and smash their pillars to bits. (25) You shall serve the LORD your God, and He will bless your bread and your water. And I will remove sickness from your midst.

(13) If, then, you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving the LORD your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, (14) I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil— (15) I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle—and thus you shall eat your fill. (16) Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. (17) For the LORD’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that the LORD is assigning to you. (18) Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, (19) and teach them to your children—reciting them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up; (20) and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates— (21) to the end that you and your children may endure, in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.

(1) To pray daily is an affirmative duty, as it is said, "And ye shall serve the Lord, your God" (Exodus 23:25). The service, here referred to, according to the teaching of tradition, is Prayer, as it is said, "And to serve Him with all your heart" (Deuteronomy 11:13), on which the sages commented, "What may be described as Service of the Heart? Prayer". The number of prayers is not prescribed in the Torah. No form of prayer is prescribed in the Torah. Nor does the Torah prescribe a fixed time for Prayer. Hence, women and slaves are under an obligation to pray, this being a duty, the fulfillment of which is independent of set periods.

(4) A Ba'al Keri [someone subject to a certain form of ritual impurity] should recite Shema in his mind and should not bless [its blessings whatsoever], not before and not after it. And on food he should bless after it and not bless before it. Rabbi Yehudah says: He should bless before and after them [Shema and food].

(5) If he was standing in prayer and remembered that he is a Ba'al Keri, he should not stop, but rather abridge [the prayer].

The Gemara challenges: And prayer, which is also a matter in which the community is engaged, and we learned in the mishna: One who was standing in prayer and remembered that he is one who experienced a seminal emission and did not yet immerse himself should not interrupt his prayer, rather he should abridge it. The Gemara infers: The reason is because he already began to pray; however, if he did not yet begin, then he should not begin, even by means of contemplation. The Gemara responds: Prayer is different in that it does not contain the acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven. The Gemara rejects this: And Grace after Meals does not contain the acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven, and yet we learned in the mishna: Over food, one recites a blessing afterward, but does not recite a blessing beforehand. (Birkat Hamazon, or Grace After Meals, is considered to be Biblically commanded, as opposed to Hamotzi, the blessing before bread, which is rabbinically commanded.)Rather, the differences must be explained otherwise: The recitation of Shema and Grace after Meals are both mitzvot by Torah law, while prayer is only by rabbinic law. Therefore, one who is impure need not pray.

But one must ask: From where does the Rambam get the idea that the obligation to pray is Biblical? That is to say, the structure of prayer, by which one must first tell the Holy One's praises, then ask for one's own needs, and then give praise and thanks? What informs the Rambam's view that this is Biblical? We did not learn this from the verse "You shall serve...(Ex. 23:25)" It seems to me that from what we say (Berachot 32a): The proper order is to say God's praises, and then to pray. And we learn this from Our Teacher Moshe, who said (Deut. 3:23-24) (23) I pleaded with the Eternal at that time, saying, (24) “O Lord Eternal, You who let Your servant see the first works of Your greatness and Your mighty hand, You whose powerful deeds no god in heaven or on earth can equal! (25) Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon.” If so, when the Torah commands us to pray, naturally, it also commands us to order our praises of the Holy One. And from the fact that we say (Berachot 34a): The first blessings are lke a servant who gives praises...the middle blessings are like a servant asking his master for a reward, and the last blessings are like a servant who received a reward, and departs from his master's presence. That is to say, that the servant thanks his master. And if one must do so before a flesh-and-blood human master, all the more so must one do so before the Ruler of Rulers, The Holy Blessed One. By this reasoning, the members of the Great Assembly established this order of prayer (praise, request, thanks), and if so, then naturally, when the Torah obligated us to pray, it was according to this model.

And it seems, in my humble opinion, that even according to the Ramban, the intention is not that the essential obligation to pray is rabbinic, and that there is no obligation from the Torah at all to pray. This simply does not make sense. Rather, it must mean that prayer is not part of any official count of commandments, and its laws are like all rabbinic laws, which when they are subject to doubt, are treated leniently. I interpret this as I do the Ramban's writings regarding shvut, the rabbinic prohibitions on Shabbat, as we accept that commerce on Shabbat is rabbinically prohibited, but that this does not mean that the Torah allows us to sit in our places of business on Shabbat, for if we did, there would be no Shabbat! After all, the prophet Nehemiah excoriated those who violated the Shabbat in this way. Rather, the intent is that commerce is clearly prohibited by the Torah, but that it does not enter the list of labors for which one incurs the Biblical punishment of stoning, even though doing business on Shabbat is prohibited by the Torah. This is what the Ritva wrote in the name of the Ramban.

And so I say, how can anyone say that we shall not pray at all to our Father in Heaven? After all, serving God is one of the three pillars upon which the world stands! And now, because of our many sins, we have no Temple, and all that is left us is prayer. And we, whose eyes are like those of servants looking to their master, how can it be that we should not plead before God, may God be blessed, every day? Moreover, I bring proof from the Ramban himself, who wrote: The essence of the verse "....and to serve Him with all your hearts" is a positive commandment, that our service to God, the exalted one, may be with all our hearts. That is to say, with full focus and intent, with the intent of "You shall love...." That the commandment is to love the Eternal with each and every heart..." And if so, then naturally, prayer falls under this description, as that is what is meant by service with full focus and intent! And how can we achieve love of the Eternal if we never pray? Moreover, it is known that according to the Ramban, the blessings before the Torah are a positive Biblical commandment, as I wrote at the beginning of chapter 47. These are the words of the Ramban: That we are commanded to thank God for the great good that God did us by giving us God's Torah. And if so, how can anyone say that we are not obligated to thank God's elevated name for all the compassionate acts and miracles that God does for us each and every moment? And how can we not ask for God's mercy every day on our health and our sustenance? Is there any greater obligation than this? It must be as as I wrote, that there is an obligation from the Torah to pray every day, even though that obligation did not enter an official count of the commandments.