You must revere the LORD your God: only Him shall you worship, to Him shall you hold fast, and by His name shall you swear (Deuteronomy 10:20).

The mitzvah of prayer – To worship God, as it says “Him shall you worship” (Sefer HaHinukh, mitzvah 433).

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 (Deut. 11:13).

Loving the LORD your God and serving Him with all your heart – what is the service that is in the heart? It is prayer (TB Ta’anit 2b).

What is prayer? Maimonides wrote:

Thus the Law distinctly states that the highest kind of worship to which we refer in this chapter, is only possible after the acquisition of the knowledge of God. For it is said, “loving the LORD your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul,” and, as we have shown several times, man’s love of God is identical with His knowledge of Him. …Our Sages have pointed out to us that it is a service in the heart, which explanation I understand to mean this: man concentrates all his thoughts on the First Intellect, and is absorbed in these thoughts as much as possible (Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed III:51).

Perhaps in a related vein, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains (in his commentary to Genesis 48:11) that prayer is not a way of looking at God, but serves so that one “may instil oneself with Divine ideas. Jewish prayer does not emanate from within, but penetrates within.”  As opposed to this, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described prayer as a bridge “leading from the heart to God” (see Kieval, The High Holidays, D. Golinkin & M. Susskind Goldberg, eds., 9).

Martin Buber also saw prayer as a means of communication between man and his Maker:

We call prayer in the pregnant sense of the term that speech of man to God which, whatever else is asked, ultimately asks for the manifestation of the divine Presence, for this Presence’s becoming dialogically perceivable (Martin Buber, “God and the Spirit of Man”).

William James took a broad view of prayer, writing:

But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.
Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion. (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience)

1. It would appear that as opposed to Maimonides and Hirsch, who seem to view prayer as a means for knowing God, Heschel, Buber and James see it as a means for perceiving God as a partner in a dialogue. Are these approaches contradictory or do they complement one another?

2. Do we necessarily take an anthropomorphic view of God when we view God as taking part in a conversation? Would that be wrong? Does Hirsch’s approach avoid that problem? Might trying to understand God through introspection also lead to anthropomorphism?

3. In Megillat Esther we read: “if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law; all alike are to be put to death” (Esther 4:11). If a mortal king cannot be approached without permission, one would think that permission would be needed to address the King of Kings. Should the mitzvah of prayer be viewed not only as imposing a duty to pray but also as granting permission to pray?