Woman's World - 014 Awareness of What We Lack & Have

Missing And Gaining Something –Two Parts To Tefillah

We have learned so far that Tefillah is mainly about our heart, not about what we say with our lips. We are trying to understand what it means that Tefillah is called “service of the heart.”

The “service of the heart” is made up of what we are missing and what we are fulfilling. Our soul is made up of things which we are missing and things which we have gained.

What we are missing are the things we ask for. The things we have gained are what we thank Hashem for when we get them.

What we lack is what stirs us and motivates us to daven, and what we gain from this is the goal – to realize what we have and to thank Hashem for it. We need both parts in order to have Tefillah.

Chazal say that a person should beseech Hashem for everything, even for a small thing. Why? It is because our davening is not just about what we are missing, but also about what we gain because of our davening.

Tefillah reveals our heart – it reveals what we are missing. Without Tefillah, a person lives all by himself. With Tefillah, a person lives with Hashem.

When a person deepens his feelings, he will be able to daven to Hashem for even the smallest thing that he feels lacking in.

Every moment, we are full of things we are missing and things which we are gaining. The only question is how aware we are to this. One who deepens his feelings and lives a more inner kind of life is able to recognize more and more in his life that he always has things which he is missing – and he is always has things which he has gained.

Deepening our feelings reveals our soul more and more, which makes us more sensitive both to feeling what we are missing and what we are having constantly in our life.

What We Have Every Moment Of Our Life

A Jew does not live alone. A Jew lives with Hashem – in a very real sense, both in this world and in the next. Our existence is constantly with Hashem – we are never alone. It is a 24\7 connection – and it is built upon the awareness of what we are saying here.

The more sensitive a person to this, the more he builds up his Tefillah. Without this awareness, a person’s life doesn’t feel like a life.

There are people who are living and appear to look alive, but they are living a deathlike kind of existence, because they live without Hashem in their life. They don’t have the awareness of the connection they could be having.

A person can daven a thousand Tefillos, yet he never experienced a real Tefillah. If a person thinks that Tefillah is all about davening to Hashem for what you need alone without having to thank Hashem – or the other way around – this is not Tefillah.

Imagine two people who live together and never talk to each other unless they have a request; they never thank each other. Can we call this a relationship? And if they only thank each other and never request anything of each other, such a relationship is also lacking. A true relationship is two-fold – requests, and gratitude.

If a person just davens and davens to Hashem but he never really talks to him, he has never really entered Tefillah.

To illustrate, an emotionally healthy father is able to express his emotions every day to his child and say, “I love you.” If a person only davens to Hashem but he can’t tell Hashem, “Hashem, I love You,” then he never talks to Hashem! He never expresses himself to Hashem – he talks to Hashem, but he never expresses himself to Him. We cannot call this a real relationship with Hashem, because there is a lot missing from the talking.

Tefillah is really to reveal our soul in relation to Hashem. This is the way to have an inner kind of life – to live with Hashem. It should become a regular part of our life and be very normal to us, just like we need to breathe in order to stay alive.

Becoming Aware Of What’s Going On

Usually people aren’t even aware of their own physical abilities that they do on a constant basis, such as breathing in and out. We need to become more aware of even our physical senses, before we begin to learn how to become aware of our spiritual aspect of life.

This is our whole source of vitality – it is not just a way to add onto our vitality. Our whole life is that we live with Hashem in our life, and it the most normal thing in the world, every bit as necessary as breathing. We aren’t always aware that we breathe, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to breathe to live. The same goes for living with Hashem in our life – just because we aren’t aware that we need Him in our life doesn’t mean that we don’t need this to survive.

Living with Hashem is our life – it is not another aspect in our life, but it is our whole vitality.

To become more aware of this, we have to at least become aware of the fact that every second, we are alive. We need to feel our existence much more in our life. This will slowly get us used to feeling that we are always being sustained by some source of vitality, and after getting used to this awareness we can begin to understand that Hashem is constantly in our life.

As you breathe in and out, pay attention to this and feel yourself being kept alive through inhaling and exhaling. Every day for a few minutes, concentrate on your breathing and realize that you are being kept alive constantly through these actions.

Of course, the more you pay attention to what’s going on constantly in your life, and you will begin to notice other things which bother you. But that’s the way life is – the more you know, the more you are able to feel pain. “Increase of knowledge increases pain.”

When you begin to experience your life more, you will experience more both positive feelings and negative feelings. But you will be experiencing life – constantly. Without this awareness, you don’t experience life – just a deathlike kind of existence.

The true way a Jew lives is to always feel alive. This brings some pain with it, but any other kind of life is like death, and it is not the way a Jew is supposed to live like.

Of course, it’s wonderful and commendable that a person learns Torah and does mitzvos. We aren’t trying to take away from that. But without an awareness of being alive and how one is always being kept alive, a person doesn’t feel himself getting vitality from it.

This is how we bring Hashem into our feelings.