Tefillah - Against the baalei mussar

I'm trying to find someone to whom I can attribute the idea which I'm about to disagree with (if you know please let me know).

I've heard people attribute to the baalei mussar that the highest level of tefillah is to not daven for anything specific; rather you should daven that hashem should do whatever is best - after all, you don't really know what is best - so maybe you / the world would really be better off if you didn't get what you're davening for.  Therefore, leave the decision about what's best to Hashem and let your role be to daven that whatever Hashem knows is best should happen.

I think this is ridiculous.  First of all, chazal were mitaken all our tefillos, and they never do this.  Much more powerfully - how different and lacking our torah would be were the characters in tanach to follow this terrible advice.   The emotional power of sefer tehillim would vanish.

We would never learn the depths of Moshe's desire to enter Eretz Yisrael.

In connection to this week's parsha, we would lose Avraham's powerful tefillah to save sdom.  Instead of "hashofet kol haaretz lo yaaseh mishpat", we would have avraham say, ok G-d, whatever you think is right.

We wouldn't even be here to discuss this question, because the exact same thing would happen when Hashem told moshe he was going to wipe us out after the cheit ha-egel.

I think this mistake is connected to another flaw in people's understanding of tefillah.  Many are troubled, how does it make sense that Hashem listens to our tefilos - mimah nafshach - if we deserve it, Hashem should give it to us without us asking, and if we don't deserve it, then asking makes it better?  How can Hashem "change his mind" (lo ish kel viychazev) simply because we lay it on very thick to him?

So theres the famous shtickel torah - tefillah doesn't change G-d, it changes you.  by davening you are transformed into a person worthy of what you're asking for.

Its cute.  And of course it is true that tefillah, by virtue of its being a mitzvah, makes one a better person.  But thats not the real answer to this question.

Let me ask you another question:  I need a house to live in.  Now, Why should I invest effort into building  this house.  Mimah nafshach - If I deserve the house, G-d must give it to me.  If I dont deserve it, then why would G-d let me keep it simply because I exerted some stupid physical effort to build the house.  Can G-d change his mind about whether or not I deserve this house simply because I build it?

Ela mai, for whatever reason (and we can get at an approximate intuitive understanding of why this is so), G-d created the world in a way that having a house to live in doesn't correspond to the simple metric of do you deserve it / do you not.  Theres another factor thrown in - did you build the house.

So Hashem also wanted another metric to be thrown in (and again, we can attain an approximate understanding of why G-d wanted this) which is that independent of deserving it, did you daven for it?  Hashem wanted to create a world where he could say Ki mi goy gadol asher lo elokim kerovim eilav - to do that he had to introduce a separate metric.  But its no different, no more unfair, no more G-d changing his mind, than the fact that you need to build a house to live in it.

(I hate to quote chasidim, but I realized that this idea is mefurash in R Tzadok.  In KBY, R Kalman Ber had us memorize this line from R tzaddok - I dont know where its from and I didnt understand its significance until I understood the above mashal.  but here it is:

"Tefillah tzarich likol davar, af al pi shekivar nigzar min hashamayim")

So if you think tefillah is really just a way to change oneself, then it doesn't really matter what you ask for.  But if we correctly understand that tefillah is part of the way Hashem created the world, and it is just like hishtadlus in that regard, then we see immediately why its important to daven for specific things.

Theres a fascinating gemara in bava metzia (I think 106a).  The gemara says something along the lines of the following:  if I asked my worker to plant wheat and he planted barley, and there was a makkas medinah that destroyed all the wheat and barley around the area, the worker is still chayav.  why? because I, thinking the worker had planted wheat, davened for hashem to protect the wheat; if there had really been wheat there, maybe my tefilla would have been answered.  since there was only barley, my tefilla had no effect.

So I was very troubled:  Does G-d run a bureaucracy up there in shamayim: Sorry sir, your tefilla form says wheat, not barley - this seems ridiculous.

But in hishtadlus, effort alone doesn't count.  If you try to build a house with rotten wood, all the good will in the world gets you no where.  Tefilla is another form of hishtadlus and hence follows the same rules.

This is all very non -rambam - esque.  But it has an application which I find inspiring, and that is again, avraham's tefilla to save sdom.  Whats pshat that avraham can argue with Hashem about whether it is just to destroy sdom or not - the chutzpah!

But as we've said, in tefilla, it does matter that you are specific.  you shouldn't leave it to g-d to decide whats best; rather, as part of your hishtadlus of tefilla, you have to evaluate what you think is best / right to ask for (the same way that in regular hishtadlus you have to decide what to be mishtadel for).  Avraham thought it was right to save sdom - if he had any other way to do so, he would have tried it.  but he didn't.  so his last line of hishtadlus was tefillah.  Even if G-d himself wants to destroy sdom, that doesn't change avraham's moral compass of right and wrong - he is still obligated to be mishtadel to do good - and part of that chiyuv includes davening.  (This is al derech the machlokes rambam and ramban about ratzon hashem and right and wrong (ramban somewhere in bris bein habesarim) but thats for another discussion).  This is a very powerful idea.

Good shabbos!