In the Amidah, also known as the prayer of the eighteen, there is a verse that says, Vekabel barachim ovratzon et tefilatenu, which translates as “receive with mercy the ratzon of our prayers”.   It’s quite perplexing that verse, because we’re not asking God to listen to our prayer. What we’re asking of God is to kabel, to receive the ratzon or the desire of our prayer.  How does that make any sense? One would think that God would receive our words, that which we express through speech, but we ask God not to focus on our words, but to focus on something called ratzon, which we can translate as will or desire.  Therefore, we’re asking God to access or kabel (receive) the desire and/or the will of our prayers. Why is that significant to Kabbalah?

 There is a story of my Rebbe when he was an adolescent. He is introduced to a Rabbi that he has to learn from. The Rabbi agreed to teach him under one condition: he couldn’t ask why the Rabbi is doing what he is doing.  In other words, whatever it was that my Rebbe saw the Rabbi do could not be questioned. So adamant was the Rabbi about this condition, that if my Rebbe asked, the Rabbi would answer, but my Rebbe could no longer learn from him.  My Rebbe agreed, and he sat and observed the Rabbi interacting with various people about issues they were having with their life.  As more and more people approach the Rabbi with questions, my Rebbe started to get more and more confused.  Question after question came to the Rabbi, and yet he answered none of them. Rather, he gave each and every single person that came up to him advice and help in one form or another that had nothing to do with the question they asked, but people were leaving satisfied.

Eventually, my Rebbe couldn’t take it anymore, and so he finally asked the Rabbi,  thereby forfeiting his opportunity to learn from him anymore.  He asked why the Rabbi was responding to questions in a way that never even addressed the actual question.  The Rabbi responded “A lot of people have questions that have nothing to do with what they really want to ask because they’re uncomfortable asking about the certain situation they’re in”. It was the Rabbi’s responsibility not to be sensitive to their words, but to the desire that lied within their hearts, which they were trying to express in a hidden way through their speech.  In other words, the Rabbi’s role was to be able to kabel ratzon et tefilatenu, to receive the desire (ratzon) of a person’s words, to be sensitive to receiving and processing what they wanted and not just answering a seemingly black and white question in a black and white way.

This is precisely what we ask of God during the prayer of eighteen. We ask Him to be sensitive to that which we desire, even if it means that we can’t express it in words.  And in the same way God has to kabel, to receive our desire in a way that He hears it past our words, we also have to become sensitive to His ratzon, His will, His desire, irrespective of what we see in our life as true, because no matter how we see the world, for the good or bad, it really is an expression of God’s desire to give us an infinite and boundless light and pleasure. Kabbalah is the science through which we can access the ratzon of God, a ratzon of love, a ratzon of unlimited giving, which allows us to look past the superficial world in front of us in order that we access the infinite. Where do we see this? In the shma prayer. It says vehaya im shamo’a tishme’u el mitzvotay asher anochi metzaveh etchem, “If you will listen to my commandments, which I have commanded you”. Why are we instructed just to listen to God’s commandments in the shma? Why doesn’t God tell us to perform or to fulfill? Why listen? It is because every mitzvah is trying to speak to us, it is trying to communicate to us a message for which we have to be sensitive. It is not enough that we perform or fulfill by rote action. Rather, we are challenged with the task of looking past the superficial so we can listen to the voice of Hashem behind every mitzvah, to the point where we can access His ratzon. I challenge any man to listen to his tefillin, to his tzitzis, to his siddur, they have so much so say to you, God has so much to say to you, because there’s so much He wants for you, and with Kabbalah, you and I can begin to access His ration the way He accesses yours. All we have to do is listen.

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