“If Only We Could Pray The Entire Day!”

How a Mindset Shift Can Help Us Avoid the Doldrums of Davening

Matthew Minsk

On more occasions than I would like to admit, I have walked into shul with something on my mind and gone through the motions of davening fighting to clear my head of the distraction. When I left, I was none the more connected with Hashem or the prayer I just prayed. In one ear and out the other, in essence: It is as if the service I just participated in never happened. 

Thankfully, this does not happen every time. Many times, I can have kavanah (intention) throughout davening, concentrating on the words and my prayers. But all too often, I do not. It is clear that the thrice-daily frequency of davening leads to routine, a paradigm antithetical to deeper meaning. Obviously, kavanah is much easier to come by during neilah of Yom Kippur than Wednesday afternoon mincha in mid-November. Ideally, this should not be. Perhaps we can strive to reduce (because I am skeptical that I can eliminate) these doldrums of davening by reframing how we look at davening: An opportunity we need permission for, rather than a chore or responsibility.

Really, in some theoretical respects, we cannot daven at all. The Gemara (Berachos 33b) tells the story of someone who continues to add excess words of praise to Hashem in the first blessing of the Shemoneh Esrei, beyond the standard “hakel hagadol hagibor v’hanora” (The Great, Powerful, Awesome G-d). After he finishes, Rabbi Chanina chastises him, asking if he has sufficiently exhausted all of the possible praises of G-d? Rather, he concludes, the man’s prayer was like praising a king who owns mountains of gold for his lowly silver: What a disgrace!

Elsewhere, in Megillah (18a), the Gemara understands a verse from Tehillim (106:2) to instruct rhetorically that only one who can cover “all of the praises of G-d” — which is, of course, impossible — can invent and use his own praises. In the first example, we only have the limited capacity to praise Hashem for His “silver,” and in the second, the Gemara tells us that we don’t have the wherewithal to praise Him at all.

WAIT! Do not stop reading and take what I have written thus far as an excuse to skip davening: I have been somewhat dishonest by omitting crucial context. The previous lines of the Gemara in Megillah provided Scriptural sources for each of the 19 blessings of the Shemoneh Esrei: Without them, we would not be able to recite that prayer — but we do have those sources! Through those verses, Hashem gave us permission to use those limited blessings before Him.

“In the first example, we only have the limited capacity to praise Hashem for His “silver,” and in the second, the Gemara tells us that we don’t have the wherewithal to praise Him at all.”

Going back to the story of Rabbi Chanina (Berachos 33b), the man is only rebuked because he went beyond the four attributes we do say in the Shemoneh Esrei. For those four, Rabbi Chanina says, while one would not think he should be able to say them, Hashem gave us permission by having Moshe write them in the Torah (Devarim 10:17). Since Hashem Himself gave us instruction and guidelines for how to pray to Him through pesukim, we can use those — but no more, since if we were to go beyond what He explicitly supplied us, we could never stop.

Implicit in the reasons of both the Gemara in Megillah and Rabbi Chanina is, of course, that we would want to daven all day, if we could. The issue of supplicant in Berachos 33b is not that he added praises, per se, but that he stopped. In Megillah, the obstacle is that we, as humans, physically cannot say all of His praises — but we would want to. 

Similarly, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik offered (Halakhic Positions of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Vol. 2, by Aharon Ziegler, p.64-65) that we recite Adon Olam at the conclusion of davening as a way to flip back to the beginning of the siddur, so to speak. The Rav equates Adon Olam to a symbolic showing of wanting to keep going, if we could. In the words of Rabbi Ziegler describing Rav Soloveitchik’s opinion: “It is only because we are finite human beings that we cannot go on and on… We close our siddur not because we are finished. We show that we want to continue, but unfortunately we cannot, so we merely close with Adon Olam.”

“We want to [pray the entire day]: Praising Hashem is truly above our paygrade as finite beings… but He gives us a special dispensation to exceed our mortal bounds. It would be foolish to toss away the privilege we bargained for by not making the most of it.”

Rabbi Shalom Rosner, in his Famous Gemaras WhatsApp chat, adds to this idea that Aleinu serves a similar purpose. Aleinu should happen at the beginning of davening, as an exposition: “It is incumbent upon us to praise the Master,” but instead we say it at the end to show that we wish to continue our praise.

More succinctly, the Gemara (Berachos 21a) famously summarizes this idea: “If only we could pray the entire day!” Obviously, we cannot daven all day. We have other matters — both holy and mundane — to attend to. However, we want to: Praising Hashem is truly above our paygrade as finite beings — What can we add to the Infinite? Where can we even start? — but He gives us a special dispensation to exceed our mortal bounds. It would be foolish to toss away the privilege we bargained for by not making the most of it.

On that note, what we can do is make the most of the time we do set aside to pray. We want to pray twenty-four hours a day, but normally we only daven for about an hour and a half a day (or less, at a seven-minute-Mincha pace). If we are aware that we are squeezing so many praises — privileges unto themselves — into so little time, it makes sense to ensure that the little time we do have we make count. Perhaps that’s a message we can tap into as our mind begins to wander.