Toledot: the answer is in the calling.

We think we know prayer because it is part of our ordinary language and it is part of every of human culture. 

But just like most things familiar to us, too often, we forget to really think about what it means.

What is prayer, for you, and when was the last time you prayed?

I actually love that in the jewish tradition, prayer is not just one thing.

In fact, we have a typology of prayer- a three part one, in its most basic form.

Our prayers are called hodaya- thanking God, Hallelujah, praising God, and Bakasha, asking something to God.

You may have been told in your childhood that it’s not good to only address God to ask for things.

Of course. We don’t want just that type of relationship with Life where we’re just waiting to be served.

Yet there is something unique in the quality and the intimacy of our relation to life source when, at times when we feel broken, we suddenly, sincerely, spontaneously, simply pour our hearts to “God”- sometimes even if we don’t “believe”, or we’ve never spoken to “God” or ever thought of doing it.

But sometimes, when we simply need help and don’t know where else to ask, when we are so depleted or broken that our views and resistances and pride disolves, something opens in us, and we just connect.

And then we can hear ourselves say the strangest things.

Sometimes we say thank you and ask for help at the same time.

This is how Jonah prayed in the belly of the Fish.

This is how David ha Melekh, pursued by the jealous king, prayed for refuge in his hiding.

This is how a year and a half ago, Israeli Hostage Or Levy suddenly heard himself speak to God although he had never thought of speaking to It before, after he couldn't even speak any more to the crack in the wall because in the pitch dark of the Hamas tunnels there was nothing to be seen. This week’s parasha opens on a poignant case of one of the deepest prayers know: bakasha, request.

וַיֶּעְתַּ֨ר יִצְחָ֤ק לַֽיהֹוָה֙ לְנֹ֣כַח אִשְׁתּ֔וֹ 

כִּ֥י עֲקָרָ֖ה הִ֑וא

“And Isaac prayed to the Lord in the presence of his wife, because she was burren"  (Bereshit 25.21)

Just like the first couple of the jewish people Avraham and Sarah, their son Yitzhak and his wife Rivka spend much of their life and mariage- decades, without being able to conceive. Few things are more painful in the human experience.

So Yitzhak prays. And here the Kedushat Levi points to something so poignant: the exact same word is used to name Ytzhak’s request, and God’s response: vayieater: וַיֶּעְתַּ֨ר

There are many words in Hebrew to speak about this type of praying of supplication. But this specific term, the Berditchever rebbe reminds us, has a specific meaning: According to the Talmud (Yevamot 64), it speaks about turning upside down the order of reality 

מה עתר זה מהפך את התבואה

“What is ‘atar’? It is something that turns over the outcome .”

Sometimes things feel ineluctable. An illness. Infertility. Depression. 

And suddenly, miracles seem to happen. Everything seems to turn upside down

Suddenly the ineluctable feels reversible; the curse turned into a blessing.

This may be because there is something energetic about prayer:

When I pray, I connect to Life Source energy.

And perhaps, this is the kind of miracle that happens: as soon as I connect to life  energy, just by doing it, something changes in me: it becomes more part of me, and I become more part of it.

Through praying, I have just stepped again into the flow of life.

I have stopped keeping myself separate from the shefa- abundance of the flow of life who is good and wants to give.

And then, something happens.

It happens, but not in my terms, of course. In God’s terms.

It happens just in the way things were meant to be for me, in this moment, in this context, and according to how much I was capable of connecting myself to life source and gave myself permission to receive.

Perhaps this is why the verse uses the same word for the calling of man and the answer of God: to remind us that we and the divine are intertwined, like mirrors, and that when I align myself, the answer can be heard in the calling itself.