Isaac in the field: Prayer as holy conversation
One scene in this week’s sedra has left a mark on Jewish law. Abraham has sent his servant to find a wife for Isaac. He finds Rebecca and brings her back with him. The first glimpse she has of her future husband is significant. Isaac has “gone out into the field toward evening to meditate.” It is a fitting image.
Isaac is the quiet figure among the heroes of Tanach. Jacob and Moses meet their future wives at a well, where they perform acts of courage and kindness. In Isaac’s case, it is Rebecca who does the act of kindness at the well — and Isaac himself is not even there.
Isaac is withdrawn, inward, introspective. In their marriage it is more often Rebecca who is the active partner. Meditating in a field — that is Isaac’s characteristic gesture. He is a man of complex psychology. How could he not be? Bound and almost killed as a child, he bore a mark on his soul we can only guess at. Because the Torah usually gives us only oblique hints about people’s inner feelings, he is curiously opaque. We know less about him than almost any other personality in Bereishit.
The Talmud, more concerned with halachah than psychology, draws its own inference from the verse. Isaac’s “meditation” was a prayer. “Toward evening” means afternoon. If Isaac’s behavior had normative implications, it meant that he instituted Minchah, the afternoon prayer. What is the connection between the patriarchs and prayer?
The Talmud (Berachot 26b) records a famous disagreement among the Sages as to the origin of the three daily prayers. Were they a substitute for the sacrifices of the Temple? Or did their origins go further back into Israel’s past?
Rabbi Jose son of Rabbi Hanina said, “The prayers were instituted by the patriarchs.” Rabbi Joshua son of Levi said, “The prayers were instituted to replace the daily sacrifices.”
Abraham instituted the morning prayer, as it says, “And Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he had stood,” and “standing” means prayer, as it says, “Then Pinchas stood up and prayed.”
Isaac instituted the afternoon prayer, as it says, “And Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening,” and “meditation” means prayer, as it says, “A prayer of the afflicted when he faints and pours out his meditation before the L-rd.”
Jacob instituted the evening prayer, as it says, “And he encountered [vayifga] a place,” and pegiah means prayer, as it says, “Therefore do not pray for this people … nor make intercession [tifga] to Me.”
More is at stake in this disagreement than halachah and history. At issue is the very nature of prayer itself.
• • •
There were two distinct spiritual traditions in biblical Judaism. On the one hand were the patriarchs and prophets. They were, if one can put it this way, ordinary people with extraordinary gifts — above all, the gift of being able to speak and listen to the voice of G-d. The patriarchs were shepherds. So too was Moses. They wore no robes of office. Alone — away from the noise of urban civilization — they heard and heeded G-d’s word. They prayed as the situation demanded. No two prayers were the same. They spoke from the depths of their being to the One who is the depth of all Being. That is patriarchal and prophetic prayer.
There was another type of religious personality: the priest. He did have special robes of office. He was a “holy man,” set apart from others (this is the root meaning of kadosh, “holy,” in Judaism). For him, avodah, Divine “service,” primarily meant offering a sacrifice. The temidim, or regular sacrifices, had their own time (morning and afternoon), their own place (the Sanctuary, later the Temple) and their own precisely defined ritual, never varying.
Spontaneity, essential to the prophet, is disastrous for the priest. Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu, seized by the mood of the moment, made their own offering at the inauguration of the Sanctuary, and died as a result. If the prophet represents the “now” of the religious life, the priest represents eternity. Without spontaneity, the spirit withers; without structure, it lapses into chaos. Without prophets, the faith of Israel would have grown old; without priests, it would never have become the code of a nation.
The question between Rabbi Jose son of Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Joshua son of Levi was therefore: To which of these traditions did prayer belong? To the patriarchs or the priests? To supplication or sacrifice? To the personal dialogue of the soul or the collective worship of the nation?
• • •
To this day we say the Amidah twice: once privately and silently as individuals, and then publicly and collectively as a community (the Reader’s Repetition). The silent prayer belongs to the world of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Rachel and Hannah. It is private and personal, and can include (within certain halachic parameters) individual requests. The Reader’s Repetition follows the logic of the sacrifices (which is why there is no repetition at Maariv, the evening service: there was no nighttime sacrifice in the Temple). We thus preserve both the patriarchal and priestly traditions.
My predecessor as Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits, of blessed memory, used to note that the sun’s position at each stage of the day mirrored the lives of the patriarchs. In the morning, the sun is in the east — and Abraham began his life in the east, in Ur of the Chaldees, in Mesopotamia. In the early afternoon, the sun is high in the middle of the sky — reminding us of Isaac, who spent his entire life within the land of Canaan, later to become Israel. In the evening the sun is in the west, as was Jacob, who ended his life in exile in Egypt.
The characteristic mood of each time of day is also reflected in the lives of the three fathers. Abraham is morning: the dawn of a new faith. According to the Midrash, it was he who broke his father’s idols, recognizing the inner contradictions of polytheism and paganism. His religious career began with a journey away from his land, his birthplace and his father’s house to a new and unknown destination. Abraham represents beginning — a new chapter in the religious history of humankind.
Isaac is afternoon. There is nothing spectacular about the afternoon; there is no qualitative change from dark to light or day to night, only a slow, almost imperceptible shift. Isaac is the bridge between day and night, and between the lives of Abraham and Jacob, both fraught with drama. He is not the prime mover of events. Yet without a bridge we cannot cross from one domain to another. If Abraham is the iconoclast, Isaac represents the quiet courage of continuity, without which the entire project of the covenant would die.
Jacob is night. He sees his great vision of the ladder and angels at night. He struggles with an unknown adversary at night. He ends his days in exile, at the beginning of the long, dark night of slavery. Jacob’s great strength is that he does not let go. He is born holding his brother’s heel. He refuses to release the stranger wrestling with him. If Abraham is originality and Isaac continuity, Jacob represents tenacity.
The verbs associated with each are also different. Abraham “rises early in the morning” and “stands.” When it comes to prayer, he is the initiator. Acknowledging that he is “but dust and ashes,” he nonetheless utters the most audacious prayer of all time: “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” That is prayer as amidah.
Jacob, by contrast, “encounters.” It is not he who seeks G-d on his flight from home but G-d who seeks him. The phrase the Torah uses just before Jacob’s vision of the ladder is vayifga ba-makom, which in rabbinic Hebrew could be read to mean “he bumped into G-d.” There are spiritual experiences we have when we least expect them — when we are alone, afraid, thinking of something else altogether. The great transformative experiences — love, a sudden sense of beauty, an upsurge of happiness — happen unpredictably and leave us, in Wordsworth’s famous phrase, “surprised by joy.” The glory of Jacob’s epiphany is that it happened at night, in the midst of fear and flight. That is prayer as pegiah.
• • •
There is a third kind of prayer. Isaac is “meditating” in the field — but the word sichah in modern Hebrew means not only meditation but also, and primarily, conversation. When the Talmud says, in the context of Isaac, ein sichah ela tefillah, we could translate the phrase as “conversation is a form of prayer” — and in a profound sense it is. Prayer is a conversation between heaven and earth. But conversation is also a prayer, for in true conversation I open myself up to the reality of another person. I enter his or her world. I begin to see things from a perspective not my own. In the touch of two selves, both are changed.
A genuine human conversation is therefore a preparation for, and a microcosm of, the act of prayer. In prayer I attend to the presence of G-d, listening as well as speaking, opening myself to a reality other and infinitely vaster than my own, and I become a different person as a result. Prayer is not monologue but dialogue. Before every Amidah we say, “O L-rd, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare Your praise.” In prayer, then, we do not simply speak; we are also spoken to and through. The very words we use are not our own but those of thousands of years of our people’s history as they encountered G-d and articulated their response. Prayer is like an electrical connection. While it lasts, we become a channel through which the energy of the universe (creation) and Jewish history (redemption) flows, and which we make our own. That is prayer as sichah.
Thus there are three modes of spirituality, and we experience each in the course of a single day: the human quest (Abraham, morning prayer), the dialogue (Isaac, afternoon prayer) and the Divine encounter (Jacob, evening prayer). That is how three events in the lives of the patriarchs — Abraham’s early rising, Isaac’s meditation in a field and Jacob’s vision at night — became not just events in the past but permanent possibilities for us who follow in their footsteps, guided by their precedent, lifted by their example, enlarged by their spirit, summoned to their heights.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, was Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, 1991–2013.
