My parents got into an argument the other day and they were both infuriated at each other. Details don’t matter. My father’s anger dissipated quickly, but my mom was still upset. Time passed and things got pretty awkward. All of a sudden, my father asked her, “Sweetie, do you remember where you put my shaver?” (he shaved an hour ago). My mother answers, and then my father responds and gradually, they started talking to each other. Slowly, but surely, they rose above their tension  and connected with each other. My father didn’t want the meaningless shaver, he wanted the connection he had with her, he wanted the intimacy that left him.

The Torah explains that we have to relate to God, literally. Meaning, we have to understand our connection to the Creator as we would an intimate relationship: “And you shall love your God with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The heart constitutes the sum total of one’s desires. I’m sure everyone’s heard of the term “follow your heart.” It’s not the muscle that pumps blood throughout the body to which I’m referring, but the seat of one’s inner deficiencies. Furthermore the Babylonian Talmud asks “What sort of (avodah) work is there in the heart?-Prayer (T’fila)” (Ta’anit 2a). It’s no cooncidence that prayer is understood to be the avodah shebalev (the work in the heart). It follows that if prayer is the work in the heart, and the heart is the summation of all one’s desires, then prayer is the work with one’s desires, their wants.

What do we want? We want pleasure, satisfaction, a sense of wholeness…to feel good all the time, the greater the duration of the satisfaction the better. And we tend to fulfill ourselves by acquiring various forms of material pleasures (money, cars, partying, etc). But if we delve deep enough, we’ll understand that we really don’t want things. Rather, we want the fulfillment those things give us. Nobody wants a car, money, etc. We want the fulfillment the car, the money, or the partying will give us; the material we think we want is really a bridge to connect to a sensation that’s much deeper than the physical thing we acquire, it’s a non-physical sensation. What does a good feeling look like? What does it smell like? Does it have a color? The sensation of satisfaction is not physical, it’s spiritual. To reiterate, pleasure is an internal experience, which we acquire through external means, we delve into ourselves and our discernments and reach a state of bliss through an interaction with our surroundings. But what if we didn’t need the externality? What if we could connect to that inner delight within ourselves without the need for external means? Remember external means are just shells that cover an inner delight within ourselves that is then uncovered. We have to fulfill our desires in a different way. This is the work in the heart, the avodah shebalev, it is working with desires and filling them in a different way, by connecting to God, the energy and vitality for everything, and to connect to the Creator is synonymous to connecting to the source from which all pleasures are derived. Imagine the feeling, of boundless energy permeating you, you would forget what you asked for and pay attention to the the intimacy, the connection. Because the intensity of the pleasure exceeds the delight we’d acquire through external means.

Prayer was set forth to connect to HaShem, not to ask Him for stuff for the sake of getting stuff, but to have the opportunity to ask just to be close to Him. You don’t need the thing that you’re asking for, you only need it to the extent you can make contact with Him. We don’t pay attention to the reward, but rather the greatness and omnipotence of Giver of the reward (RABASH). That’s the beauty of prayer.