Parshas Ki Seitzei: Three Women, Three Tefillos

We are in Elul, preparing for the Yamim Noraim, and Rabbi Adi is walking us through the three words we will say over and over on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: u'teshuvah u'tefillah u'tzedakah, repentance, prayer, and tzedakah remove the evil of the decree. Last week was tzedakah. This week: tefillah, prayer, another tool both for every single day and for the high holidays coming toward us.

Amalek and the hands of Moshe

How does tefillah connect to this week's parsha? Rabbi Adi joked that a rabbi has to be able to connect anything to anything, but here the connection is real. The very end of Parshas Ki Seitzei is the war with Amalek, and the command to remember what Amalek did and to erase its memory.

First, a practical side point he wanted everyone to know for this Shabbos. We normally fulfill the mitzvah of remembering Amalek once a year, on Shabbos Zachor right before Purim, when we read the end of this week's parsha as the maftir. The Chasam Sofer notes that according to many opinions this mitzvah must be done at least once every twelve months, and here is the catch: this coming year is a leap year, which means more than twelve months will pass between last Purim's Parshas Zachor and the next one. So the Chasam Sofer says: when you hear the end of this week's parsha being leined in shul, have in mind that you are fulfilling the mitzvah of remembering Amalek, so that twelve months do not go by without it.

Now to the main point. The Mishnah asks how Bnei Yisrael won the war with Amalek, and describes the famous scene: while the people fought, Moshe stood with his hands raised toward the sky. Whenever Moshe's hands were raised, Bnei Yisrael prevailed; whenever his hands dropped, they began to lose. And the Mishnah itself asks the obvious question: do the hands of Moshe make war? How could his hands win a battle? And it answers: it was never the hands. When Moshe's hands were lifted toward heaven, everyone looked up at their leader, and his raised hands reminded them to lift their own hearts and daven to Hashem. When his hands dropped, they forgot. The power that won the war was the power of tefillah. That is the connection.

And when the Torah wants to teach us how to daven, it teaches us mostly through women. Chazal say the power of tefillah is very strong, but the tefillah of women is exponentially stronger, and if you look through Tanach, the great lessons of prayer come from women. The Gemara teaches that a complete tefillah has three parts: shevach, praise; bakashah, request; and hoda'ah, thanks. This is exactly how the rabbis built our Shemoneh Esrei: it opens with praise of Hashem through the Avos, moves into a long series of requests, and closes with Modim, thanksgiving. Rabbi Adi took each of the three parts and learned it from a different woman.

Chana

We begin with Chana, because her story is the Haftarah we read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Chana was married to Elkanah for many years and had no children, while Elkanah's other wife had ten sons. Elkanah tried to comfort her, am I not better to you than children, but she was shattered. This was in the era after Bnei Yisrael entered the Land, when for about four hundred years, before Dovid HaMelech and before his son Shlomo built the Beis HaMikdash in Yerushalayim, the Mishkan and the center of Jewish life stood in a place called Shiloh.

On Rosh Hashanah, Chana came to the Mishkan in Shiloh, and she began to cry and to whisper, mouthing the words under her breath. Understand how strange this looked: until that moment, prayer was a public, out-loud thing, with korbanos (offerings). Eli, the Kohen Gadol, watched her lips moving with no sound and concluded she was drunk, and he confronted her. She answered that she was not drunk; she was pouring out her heart to Hashem. Eli realized his mistake, blessed her, and within the year she had a son: Shmuel, who grew up to be the great navi.

Two questions. First, Eli was the Kohen Gadol, a wise and sensitive man, and the Navi says he sat there watching her the whole time. It is not hard to tell the difference between a woman pouring out her heart and a drunk. How could he possibly get this wrong? And if he truly believed a drunk person was standing in the Mishkan, he should have removed her immediately; the Mishkan already had the tragedy of Nadav and Avihu, which one opinion connects to entering after drinking wine. Why did he sit and watch? Second, is there a deeper reason we read this story on Rosh Hashanah, beyond the fact that it happened on Rosh Hashanah?

To answer, you need to know what Rosh Hashanah is. The Torah calls it only “Yom Teruah,” a day of shofar blasts, and it is the Oral Torah that tells us what the day means: it is the day we coronate Hashem as King. (This, Rabbi Adi added, is one of countless places where the written Torah cannot be understood without the oral tradition. The Torah says to take a “pri eitz hadar” on Sukkos, a beautiful citrus fruit; how does every Jew know that means an esrog and not a lemon or an orange? Only through the Oral Torah.) That is why the davening of Rosh Hashanah is saturated with kingship: HaMelech HaKadosh, the holy King; Melech al kol ha'aretz, King over the whole world. Rav Soloveitchik of Boston, who taught at YU, used to retell what his third-grade rebbe taught him: a king sits on his throne, and the boys lift the crown from the table and place it on his head. That, said the rebbe, is what every single Jew is doing on Rosh Hashanah, the baker, the shoemaker, the third graders: each of us takes the crown and places it on the King's head. A few years ago, when King Charles was crowned in England with days of televised processions and guards and ceremony, it became a little easier for us to imagine what a coronation even is.

But now there is a problem. Imagine, at that coronation, one man slips past all the guards, runs up to King Charles, and says: congratulations, Your Majesty, I am so happy you are my king. By the way, I am building an extension on my house for my growing family and the zoning laws will not allow it. Could you help me with the zoning? Everyone would say the man is out of his mind. On coronation day, you do not run to the king with your renovation requests.

That, said Rabbi Adi, is the key to Eli. Perhaps Eli never thought Chana was literally drunk; had he thought that, he would have removed her on the spot. “Drunk” meant something else: self-absorbed. Eli was saying, on this day, Rosh Hashanah, the day of the King's coronation, how can you stand here thinking only about yourself and asking for a child? Today you should be asking what you can do for the King! And Chana's answer is the whole lesson. She was not asking for a child in order to have a child. She vowed: give me a son, and I will give him to Hashem all the days of his life. I want a child so that this child will sanctify Your name. Her request itself was a coronation. And that is shevach, the first part of tefillah: even our requests should be framed so that what we are really asking is, give me the tools to crown You more.

Rav Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, the great defender of the Jewish people, was once approached on Rosh Hashanah by a scoffer who said: look at them all, crying and shuckeling; if you could squeeze their tefillos out of them, every one is asking for money, money, money. Rav Levi Yitzchak answered: you may be right that they are asking for money. But why are they asking for money? Because they want to make a beautiful Shabbos meal. Because they want to host guests. Because they want to help someone in need get to the hospital. Squeeze the tefillos of a Jew, and what comes out is giving.

Rachel

The second part of tefillah is bakashah, asking, and its teacher is Rachel Imeinu. The Midrash on Eichah describes the moment the Jewish people were driven into exile. One by one, the greatest of all generations rise to plead before Hashem. Avraham says: I proclaimed You to the whole world; in my merit, take them back. No. Yitzchak says: I let myself be bound on the mizbeach; in my merit. No. Yaakov, Moshe, Aharon, Dovid, each one pleads, and each one is turned away.

After Avraham, Moshe, and Aharon have all been rejected, would it be rational for anyone else to step forward and think, maybe for me He will change His mind? And yet Rachel Imeinu steps forward, crying. And to her, Hashem answers:

מִנְעִי קוֹלֵךְ מִבֶּכִי וְעֵינַיִךְ מִדִּמְעָה כִּי יֵשׁ שָׂכָר לִפְעֻלָּתֵךְ... וְשָׁבוּ בָנִים לִגְבוּלָם

Hold back your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for there is reward for your work... and the children will return to their border. (Yirmiyahu 31)

Rachel teaches us never, ever to stop asking, because you do not know when you will be answered. Everyone before you may have been turned away; cry anyway.

Rabbi Adi told a story he heard from a friend, from his years at a learning center in Yerushalayim that has since closed. The friend once met an older Jew there, a man in his sixties, and noticed he was missing a finger. Over a Shabbos meal, the man told his story. He was from Hungary, orphaned at age two when both his parents were killed in a car accident, and raised from age two to eighteen in a communist orphanage. He described the horrors: the impossible quotas of lumber the children had to cut each day. One day his hand got caught and a finger was cut off; they put a bandage on it, and the next morning he was back cutting wood.

The friend asked him: the children must have been crying all the time in that place. And the man laughed. Crying? Nobody cries in an orphanage. Think about that. In our homes, baruch Hashem, healthy homes with loving parents, twenty minutes cannot pass without a child crying about something: too much food, too little food, too hot, too cold, he hurt me, she hurt me. Why does a child cry the moment she falls down? Because she knows that a mother or father will come running to scoop her up. Crying is what you do when you know someone is coming. In an orphanage, no one is coming, so no one cries.

That is what Rachel Imeinu teaches. A Jew always has Someone to cry to. Hashem is there, He is listening, and He wants us to come crying to Him. The fact that we can cry at all is the proof that we are not orphans.

Leah

The third part of tefillah is hoda'ah, thanks, and its teacher is Leah Imeinu. When Leah's fourth son was born, she named him Yehudah and said:

הַפַּעַם אוֹדֶה אֶת יְיָ

This time, I will thank Hashem.

And on this the Gemara makes an astonishing statement: from the day the world was created, no one thanked Hashem until Leah came and thanked Him. Rashi explains that the name Yehudah itself means hoda'ah, thanks. But how can the Gemara say such a thing? Noach walked out of the ark after the flood and the first thing he did was bring korbanos of thanks. Avraham brought offerings after he was saved from the war of the kings, and again after the Akeidah. Nobody ever said thank you until Leah?

The Chasam Sofer answers: of course people thanked Hashem before Leah. But every thank you before her was for a supernatural rescue: surviving a flood that destroyed the world, surviving a war, surviving the Akeidah. Leah introduced a new level. She said thank you for something completely natural: an ordinary birth, the kind that happens every day. She was the first person to thank Hashem for nature itself.

And she introduced a second thing. Her thank you was not a one-time event. She planted it inside her son's name, so that every single time she called “Yehudah!”, she was thanking Hashem again. Hoda'ah is not a thank-you note after a miracle; it is a constant, daily awareness, woven into the ordinary words of your life.

The takeaway

Tefillah can change everything in our lives, and the way to approach it is through these three unbelievable women. From Chana: shevach, and the very idea of quiet, personal prayer, and the deepest reframing of what we ask for: everything I request is so that I can crown You more. From Rachel: bakashah, never stop asking and never stop crying, because the crying itself is proof that Someone is listening. And from Leah: hoda'ah, thank Hashem for the natural, ordinary gifts, and do it constantly, not once.

Shevach, bakashah, hoda'ah: the three parts of the Shemoneh Esrei, learned from three mothers. Take them with you into Elul, so that when we stand before the King on Rosh Hashanah, we will know exactly what we are doing there: putting the crown on His head.