The Right Way to Pray

Reading tractate Berachot over the last six weeks, I have been introduced to dozens of requirements for the right way to pray, some of them so subtle that I keep wondering how they could possibly have worked in practice. Did the average Jew of the fifth century CE know the Talmud’s intricate rules about what to do when he made a mistake in the beginning, or the middle, or the end of the Amidah? Did non-Talmud scholars—who must, then as now, have made up the majority of the Jewish population—know just at what point during prayer to bow and how deeply, or count the hours when it was permitted to say the evening prayer? These are just some of the questions that Daf Yomi has raised for me.

This week, however, the Talmud touched on a question that to me, perhaps to most modern Jews, is the first one that comes to mind regarding prayer, a question that you cannot pray without asking yourself: How do you know if God will hear your prayer?