Praying for What Is Already Decreed: Tzidkat HaTzaddik 66–67
My father and I learned Paragraphs 66–67. Hebrew letters double as numerals: ס is 60, ו is 6, ז is 7. of Tzidkat HaTzaddik (“The Righteousness of the Righteous”): Rav Tzadok’s book of short numbered teachings on spiritual life.. The first concerns prayer, including prayer for something Literally “the Name”: a reverent way of referring to God. has already decreed. The second concerns returning in Repentance; literally “return.” to earlier sins when you reach a higher A spiritual level or rung (pl. madregot)..
Before we got to either, we were talking about Shmuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) of Padua: Italian Jewish scholar, poet, grammarian and Bible commentator..1
My father had started reading Shadal’s commentary on the The Five Books of Moses; more broadly, the whole body of Jewish teaching.. His first impression was that Shadal is very much a grammarian. He is, but he is also a philologist, with an unusually wide range of reading. He will bring the The medieval rabbinic authorities (c. 11th–15th century) before the Shulchan Aruch; literally “the first ones.” and then quote Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–253), early Christian scholar who compiled the Hexapla, a six-column edition of the Hebrew Bible.. Usually to disagree with him, but he has read him.
“A scholar and a gentleman,” I said.
“Well, I never met him,” my father qualified.
The gentleman part may need some qualification too. Shadal was not especially reserved about telling other scholars what he thought of them.
We got onto his opposition to Kabbalah: the Jewish mystical tradition, whose central text is the Zohar. and his Shadal’s Vikuach al Chokhmat HaKabbalah (“Dialogue on the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” 1852), arguing that the Zohar is a late composition.. I had read it and found it convincing. It is written as a dialogue: a Polish Jew tries to convince an Italian of the The central work of Kabbalah, a mystical commentary on the Torah that surfaced in 13th-century Spain.’s antiquity, and the Italian brings a bunch of proofs against it.
He has two basic complaints. One is anachronism. You would think that if they were writing in Aramaic in the days of the The sages of the Mishnah (c. 10–220 CE); singular tanna., they would use the Aramaic of the Tannaim, not Aramaic from Spain. The other is that he holds it isn’t just a forgery, but heretical. Then comes the bombshell: by the way, it talks about The cantillation marks written with the biblical text, governing its chant and phrasing. and The system of dots and dashes written around Hebrew letters to mark vowels., which didn’t exist yet.
The answer is always that either they knew it through The holy spirit: divine inspiration short of full prophecy., or the nikud really did exist already. We were talking about Shadal’s arguments here, rather than settling the history of the Zohar.
My father asked how that related to Hasidism: the pietist movement founded in 18th-century Ukraine by the Baal Shem Tov, organized around rebbes.. As far as I know, Shadal didn’t have any polemics against it. Coming from Italy, he was pretty well removed from the whole thing. He did make his kabbalist a Polish Jew for a reason, though. That took us into The Hasidic court of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787–1859), famous for its uncompromising demand for truth. and The Hasidic movement founded by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812), known for its intellectual system of Hasidic thought..
My father had spent Shabbos reading a book about the philosophy of Kotzk, and he kept finding the same streams we had been learning in Tzidkat HaTzaddik. That makes sense. The Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica (1801–1854), author of Mei HaShiloach, student of the Kotzker Rebbe and teacher of Rav Tzadok. was a student of the Kotzker Rebbe, and Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin (1823–1900), Hasidic thinker and author of Tzidkat HaTzadik. was a student of the Izhbitzer.
My father likes the emphasis on authenticity that he finds in Kotzk and the traditions coming out of it. He described it as the recognition that you cannot think your way to God. Chabad seemed to him to offer a more intellectual system.
I pushed back on the implication that Chabad thinks you can comprehend God’s essence. Aramaic, from the Tikkunei Zohar: “No thought can grasp Him at all.”: thought cannot grasp Him at all. That is part of its own vocabulary too. God can be sensed with the heart, but not understood.
I brought a teaching of the Rabbi Dovber Schneuri (1773–1827), the second Chabad Rebbe; mittler is Yiddish for “middle.”: someone who does not try to understand Godliness: the divine, as an object of contemplation in Hasidic thought., even though לית מחשבה תפיסא ביה כלל, is like a Aramaic: “a skull that has not put on tefillin,” the Talmud’s term (Rosh Hashanah 17a) for a Jew who never wore them.—a head that has never put on Leather boxes holding Torah passages, worn on the arm and head during weekday morning prayers.. The fact that God cannot be fully grasped does not excuse us from trying to understand. As I put it during the discussion, tefillin do not go inside your head, but they do go around it.
By the end, I thought the difference we were discussing was largely one of emphasis.
Why pray for something already promised?
Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin (1823–1900), Hasidic thinker and author of Tzidkat HaTzadik. opens ס״ו:
תפלה צריך לכל דבר, אף על פי שנגזר מה׳ יתברך.
Prayer is needed for everything, even though it has already been decreed by Hashem.2
I stopped over the grammar. תפלה צריך לכל דבר technically reads as though prayer needs everything. Clearly, he means that everything needs prayer. Something like “For everything, prayer is needed.” would express that more directly. We had just been talking about Shadal. Put Shadal and Rav Tzadok in a room and they might talk past each other.
But the meaning is clear. Rav Tzadok brings The prophet Elijah, who declared a drought on King Achav’s Israel and then hid from him (1 Kings 17–18).. Hashem tells him to appear before Ahab, king of the northern kingdom of Israel and Eliyahu’s great adversary. and promises rain. Eliyahu nevertheless goes up Mount Carmel and prays until the rain comes.
I added “Moshe our teacher”: Moses, through whom the Torah was given. and the frogs. Pharaoh wants the frogs gone. Moshe says they will go. Presumably the plan was never for the frogs to remain in Egypt forever. Nevertheless, Moshe still has to pray for their removal.
Even if it’s already been decided, you still have to Yiddish for praying, especially the set daily prayers. for it.
My father wanted to understand what the prayer was doing. If it had been decided already, what was there to ask for?
I tried to explain that the decision itself can include its coming about through prayer. Something can be decreed for you without being delivered to you independently of anything you do. The fact that it is available does not mean you have received it.
The Torah says Hashem made all the vegetation on the third day. Then, in the next chapter, nothing has come up yet. Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (1040–1105) of Troyes, whose line-by-line commentary on Tanach and Talmud is the standard starting point. explains that there was no Adam yet to pray for rain. When Adam came and saw that the world needed it, he prayed, the rain fell, and everything grew.3 So good things come through davening, even when they’ve been decreed.
I remembered Rabbi Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov (1780–1844), Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s student and scribe, author of Likkutei Halakhot. discussing prayer as making Vessels (sing. keli); in Hasidic and kabbalistic thought, the containers through which divine flow can be received., vessels, through which the good can come. In Rav Natan’s multi-volume work reading the laws of the Shulchan Aruch through Rabbi Nachman’s teachings. he describes prayer as the vessel that gives the Abundance: the flow of divine blessing into the world. its beneficial form.4
The example I gave was coffee.
If you receive coffee without a cup, you are not going to get a A blessing (pl. brachot). from it. You are going to get third-degree burns.
You need a way to receive what is being given.
Rav Tzadok points out that the sages who place judgment on The Jewish New Year, on which, the Mishnah says, the world is judged. and The Day of Atonement, ten days after Rosh Hashanah, when the year’s judgment is sealed. did not disagree with the institution of daily prayer. Daily prayer still has a purpose even on their account.
An appeal, or receiving what was decreed?
There are two questions to keep track of here.
One is why I need to pray for something already decreed for the good. The other is whether prayer can overturn a decree against me.
Rav Tzadok brings the The rabbis’ extended discussion of the Mishnah; together the two make up the Talmud.’s statement that our prayers for the sick follow Rabbi Yossi ben Chalafta, 2nd-century sage, who holds that a person is judged every day (Rosh Hashanah 16a).’s opinion. He says the sages deliberately ruled this way so that our prayers would work according to Rabbi Yossi—that they could tear up even a decree issued on Rosh Hashanah.
The heavenly court follows the ruling below. The sages’ ruling therefore establishes that our prayers can be effective even against the decree of Rosh Hashanah. That is the argument Rav Tzadok is making.
The opening claim still stands separately: even where the outcome has already been decreed, prayer is necessary. You do not need to make all prayer into an attempt to reverse a decision.
My father was asking what prayer accomplishes according to the other opinion, the one that does not follow Rabbi Yossi. If the outcome has already been decided, what is the point of asking for things? Is the prayer still about Requests, petitions; the middle blessings of the Amidah are its bakashot., requests?
I said that it is. Even if something has been decreed, you still have to daven for it.
“But you’re saying that’s something good,” he objected. What if you are trying to avoid something bad?
You do not pray for something bad to happen. What you are asking for is something good. I admitted that I sometimes feel like praying for somebody to get hit by lightning, but I don’t.
Not a big fan of judgment
My father found the prospect of a predetermined bad outcome demoralizing. Suppose you somehow got an inside tip that something awful had been decreed for you. Would that make you eager to pray?
He suggested he might be on “team nihilism.”
I pointed out that if you had received reliable inside information about God’s decision, nihilism might be a difficult position to maintain.
But his objection was not really about whether judgment exists. He was saying that he did not like the prospect.
“You just don’t like the idea of there being judgment on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at all,” I said.
“Not a big fan of it.”
Rav Tzadok isn’t litigating judgment on Rosh Hashanah. That’s kind of part of Judaism, whether we like it or not. My father wasn’t disputing that it’s true. It’s just not one of the things that make him jollier.
The only way he could think about prayer, he said, was that you have an almost infinite number of appeals courts.
Well, you do have an infinite number of appeals courts. But bad things do happen. Prayer does not mean that every outcome will be reversed.
If, God forbid, somebody has lost a foot, I do not know that praying for the foot to return is the sensible response. We hear about miraculous recoveries from illness. We hear rather less about amputated feet growing back.
My father suggested praying not to get gangrene in the first place. But then how long would the list become? How would you have time to pray about every individual thing that could go wrong?
I thought “Heal us”: the Amidah’s blessing for the sick. probably covered it. When we ask for healing, gangrene is included. You do not have to specify gangrene.
Imagining a small God
From there, we got onto the tendency to imagine God as being as harsh toward us as we are toward ourselves. That makes approaching Him demoralizing before we have even started. It is part of our hang up with the idea of judgment. We imagine that God is as small as we are, and that He will be as harsh toward us as we are toward ourselves.
I recalled a story about a woman who came to Rabbi Elazar Mordechai Kenig, leader of the Breslov community in Tzfat (Safed). with a question. Everyone kept saying that teshuva fixes everything. But she had done terrible things. How could someone that bad be forgiven?
His answer, as I remember it, was that she was right about how badly she had behaved. What she had wrong was how small God was.
He did not need to tell her that everything she had done was fine. The mistake was in her picture of God’s capacity to forgive.
We say “For You, Lord, are good and forgiving” (Psalms 86:5), said in Tachanun and Selichot.: You are good and forgiving. But what do we imagine that means? I might forgive the person who hits me with his The fringed prayer shawl worn during morning prayers. while putting it on. Once. Twice. Maybe even four times.
Hashem is not limited to my version of being forgiving.
Returning to earlier sins
Then we moved to ס״ז:
בכל מדרגה שהוא עולה, יש לו לחזור ולשוב על חטאיו.
At every level to which a person rises, he has to return and repent for his sins.5
This is a new discussion. The earlier teshuva was accepted. Nevertheless, rising to a higher level means returning to those same sins under greater scrutiny.
Rav Tzadok brings “My sin is always before me” (Psalms 51:5), from David’s psalm of repentance., “my sin is always before me.” He explains the repeated return through a person’s continued ascent. He also cites the Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (1534–1572) of Safed, the founding figure of later Kabbalah. on greater scrutiny accompanying ascent in The Garden of Eden; in rabbinic thought also the realm where souls are rewarded after death., and applies the idea in this world.
Someone on a lower level who does an A sin, a transgression (pl. aveirot). has done something less severe. Once he goes up, the same aveira is worse for someone like him, so the teshuva that was enough for the lower level isn’t enough anymore.
“Because now you realize the foolishness of your own constrictedness,” my father said.
He also said it sounded like Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810), Hasidic master and great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov., who talks about doing teshuva on your teshuva. I have no problem calling it an influence. How big an influence, my father suggested, depends on whether you’re talking to a A follower of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.. But Rav Tzadok is talking about returning to earlier sins from a higher מדרגה.
Then he connects this to “Descent for the sake of ascent”: a fall that makes a greater rise possible., descent for the sake of ascent.
Scrutiny is the descent
My father brought Rabbi Nachman’s image of bending your knees before you jump. You literally go down to get the momentum to go up.
He also described a different sort of descent: becoming dissatisfied with your present way of thinking before you can move to something better. The old state has to dissolve. The period in between can feel worse.
That is an interesting explanation of ירידה לצורך עליה. But Rav Tzadok’s own is more specific:
שעת שמדקדקים בו הוא עת הירידה.
The time when he is subjected to closer scrutiny is the time of descent.
The renewed scrutiny itself is the ירידה. During that period he needs teshuva; through it he attains the עליה.
This brought us to the familiar experience of reaching another Rosh Hashanah, looking back, and thinking that you have made no progress. In the A book of Torah literature; literally “book.”, you encounter the answer that your situation has changed: you are facing the struggle from a different level, even if it looks much the same to you.
I told a A parable told to illustrate a point (pl. meshalim)..
A man wants to know his purpose in life. He fasts, prays, does whatever one does to get a revelation, and finally gets an answer.
We’ll call him Zalman.
“Zalman!”
“Oh. Hi, God. What am I supposed to do?”
There is a particular rock in a particular park. His job is to go there and push it.
Fine. The next morning he goes and pushes. He keeps pushing for months. Then the weather becomes unpleasant, his enthusiasm wears off, and he starts to wonder whether the whole thing was a good idea.
Zalman has had enough. He has been pushing this thing for five months, and it has not moved. He complains.
God tells him to look in the mirror.
He is completely jacked.
I initially tried setting the park at the intersection of two Florida roads that, my father pointed out, run parallel. We eventually found somewhere for the rock.
The point of the mashal is that the absence of the result you were measuring does not establish that nothing happened. It may be that the work is doing something you cannot see, or that you have misunderstood what the work was for.
My father thought Camus would like it.
I had my doubts about whether whoever first told the mashal had read Camus. I like to imagine a substantial overlap between Camus readers and Masters of mussar: teachers and practitioners of deliberate work on character., but it is probably smaller than I would like.
“You know what would solve that? A Venn diagram.”
“I love a Venn diagram. Everyone knows I love a Venn diagram.”6
The anguish is itself the punishment
We returned to the last line of ס״ז. Rav Tzadok says that the Anguish; literally “grief of the soul.” a person has over his sins is itself the punishment. He refers back to נ״ז, where he has already described that anguish as the suffering of The place or process of punishment after death, usually understood as purifying and temporary..7
My father found that a comparatively merciful picture, as opposed to punishment in hell afterward. I pointed out that, in this account, the anguish is itself that experience of Gehinnom.
I connected this with another teaching we had learned earlier: the highest teshuva is when “Deliberate sins become like merits” (Yoma 86b): what teshuva out of love achieves., when deliberate sins become like merits. That means recognizing that even one’s past sins were within God’s will. Rav Tzadok discusses that in אות מ׳, where he treats divine knowledge and human choice as true from their respective standpoints.8
Those ideas seemed connected to me: the anguish over the sin is itself the punishment, and the ultimate teshuva involves a different understanding of the past and God’s will. I do not know that Rav Tzadok would recognize Dante’s Inferno as the picture he is describing.
My father described it as a more merciful conception of God. We finished there.
Shadal, Vikuach al Chokhmat HaKabbalah. This opening discussion and the Mittler Rebbe teaching are recalled from our conversation; the latter is not a verified verbatim quotation. ↩︎
Tzidkat HaTzaddik, אות ס״ו; I Kings 18:1, 42–45; Rosh Hashanah 16a. The comparison with Moshe and the frogs is my addition: Exodus 8:8–9 in Hebrew numbering. ↩︎
Genesis 1:11–12 and 2:5, with Rashi on 2:5, from Chullin 60b. ↩︎
Likkutei Halakhot, Orach Chaim, Hilkhot Rosh Chodesh 5:34. The coffee illustration is mine. ↩︎
Tzidkat HaTzaddik, אות ס״ז. Rav Tzadok cites Psalms 51:5. The jump comparison, which my father brought from Rabbi Nachman, and the rock mashal belong to our discussion, rather than the paragraph itself. ↩︎
A joke about Kamala Harris and her enthusiasm for Venn diagrams. ↩︎
Tzidkat HaTzaddik, אות מ׳. The phrase זדונות נעשות לו כזכויות is from Yoma 86b. ↩︎
