To ask for help. That is the most basic element of prayer. To say – I am not capable of doing this alone. Help me to accomplish what I am meant to accomplish. Help me to serve You.
The first person in the Torah to pray such a prayer is not Avraham or Noah but Avraham’s servant in this week’s parsha. We hear his words repeated several times and maybe it is to make clear the importance of such prayer. “O Lord, the God of my master Avraham, grant me good fortune this day and deal graciously with my master Avraham.” Help me to do what I came here to do – find an appropriate wife for Yitzhak.
Every day we say of God, in the blessing of the Amidah, that He is a melekh ozer, “a king who helps.” That is how we open our hearts and minds to prayer – with this most basic acknowledgment of our need for help from above.
We are, each of us, servants, like Avraham’s servant, who were sent out on some mission. We may not know the mission or its purpose, but we can feel that we are here to accomplish some divine purpose. And so our own prayers are similar – O God, please help me to succeed in my task. Or as the hazan (prayer leader) says in the beginning of Musaf on the High Holidays, heyeh na matzliah darki – Please help make my way, my path, successful.
There are days and there are days. On some days, we go about our lives busy and confident, without any sense of needing help. On these days, we pray in order to be humbled, to remind ourselves that nothing we accomplish we do alone. On other days, we feel overwhelmed and depressed over the impossibility of the tasks before us. On such days, we pray for encouragement and support, we pray to remind ourselves that we are indeed not alone, and we ask desperately for the help we need from above, feeling solace in the very act of asking.
May our way be paved and may we know how to ask for help in paving it.
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