Adath Israel San Francisco | Modern Orthodox Synagogue in San Francisco | A Welcoming Shul and Jewish Community

The Fear of the Unknown

There is a saying on Wall Street - “markets hate uncertainty.” The wisdom behind that is that when there is good news or bad news, we know exactly how to respond. The bad news may be bad, but at least there is an action item as a result. However, if we don’t know what’s going to happen next, the wait and see approach can be very unnerving. This idea is true well beyond the markets. All the uncertainties that we face, whether they are with regards to the political landscape, the economic landscape, or any other uncertainty that we deal with (such as our physical well-being), takes a toll on us emotionally.

The source (Berachot 26b) that our forefather Avraham instituted the Shacharit service is from the verse in our Parasha “וישכם אברהם בבקר,” “and Avraham arose in the morning”. Strangely, the verse appears right after the destruction of Sodom (19:27). There are numerous examples in the Torah of Avraham davening. There are indications that before the akeidah (the binding of Yitzchak), when the Torah uses the same words וישכם אברהם בבקר that they mean - he got up to daven. Why, then, did Avraham’s prayer at the conclusion of the Sodom story become the paradigm for the Shacharit service? Why not the prayer before the akeidah?

It is unclear what Avraham knew before he started davening that paradigmatic Shacharit. On the one hand, the Torah presents this verse after already describing the destruction of Sodom. On the other hand, it is only in the next verse that Avraham looks out and sees the smoke. R. Ovadia S’forno (16th century Italy) suggests that Avraham had tried the day before to persuade HaShem using logic. Now he was simply begging for mercy. R. Meir Leibush Wisser (19th century Ukraine) suggests that Avraham was davening for continued mercy for Lot. Either way, Avraham came back to the same place he davened the day before (when he argued with God trying to save Sodom) and took a different approach.

From the time Lot left Avraham’s house for Sodom, the word Sodom was synonymous with chaos. First, Lot abandons the family and its values for the good life in Sodom. Then Sodom gets involved in war and Lot gets kidnapped. Now, Sodom is in the middle of getting destroyed. When we read the chapter, we know what happened — Sodom was destroyed, Lot and his family survived, but his wife turned into a pillar of salt. However, Avraham, when he davened, was davening with a lack of clarity. Did HaShem find enough tzadikim to spare some of the people? What happened to Lot? If Sodom was destroyed, what are the ramifications going forward? 

Contrast this prayer with the prayer before the akeidah. The akeidah may have been a difficult challenge, but the objective was clear. Avraham’s tefillah was that he will be successful carrying out G-d’s will. There was no chaos and no missing pieces of information. 

The Shacharit service is modeled after the prayer of Avraham in the midst of chaos at a time when he didn’t even know what was happening or what had happened already, and he certainly didn’t know what was going to happen next. His Shacharit was like someone praying in the waiting room of the hospital, waiting for a doctor to come out and give some news.

We all prefer to have a bit of certainty in our lives. We would love to know that what we think is going to happen next, will actually happen next. Yet we know that even if things initially do go as planned, there will be bumps in the road or actual roadblocks. And when things don’t go as planned, there are twists and turns that can lead to great success. Uncertainty is part of life. When we daven Shacharit, or any tefillah, it is not about asking for stuff, a spiritual shopping list, rather it’s about creating interconnected dependency between us and HaShem. Even if the world today is unclear and unresolved, we can still connect to HaShem. These moments of chaos have enormous potential, and rather than reacting to them with despair we should embrace prayer and our connection to HaShem, thereby giving us the ability to cope with whatever challenge we’re facing.