To Achieve Intent in Prayer, You Must First Consider This

One of the most challenging sections in the Shulchan Aruch is Section 98, which deals with the intent during prayer: "The one who prays must focus in his heart on the meaning of the words he is uttering, and imagine as if the Shechina is before him. He must remove all distracting thoughts until his mind and intent are pure in his prayer, and consider as if he were speaking before a human king, arranging his words carefully to avoid making mistakes. How much more so before the King of Kings, Hashem, who scrutinizes all thoughts."

How are we supposed to achieve such intent? The Talmud tells us that preparing the mind before prayer was common among the early pious ones, who would spend an hour before and an hour after the prayer directing their hearts towards the Divine. What did they do during that hour?

The word "meditation" often relates to idolatry, but its translation into Hebrew is "contemplation." This is precisely what one is supposed to do before prayer to direct the mind—contemplate intellectually, which means to think. But what should one think about, and how is it done?

Rabbi Moses Isserles, the Rema, provides an interesting key in a note to this section: "One should think before prayer of the lofty nature of Hashem and the lowliness of man." That is, the solution for intent in prayer is not by adopting an external act but by elevating our mental state.

A few years ago, I came across a website about the scales of the universe. The main screen of the site shows a human figure, and with a small mouse move, you can descend to smaller scales—bacteria, viruses, atomic particles, nanoparticles, and more, until you reach sizes so tiny that science is unable to penetrate them. If you move the mouse to the other side, you gain a perspective of size—the human compared to the entire USA, the Earth, the sun, the solar system, distant galaxies, and more, until you reach the size of the observable universe. While we are confident that we understand the world, it turns out that what we see is not even a tiny fraction of what exists. Suddenly, a true perspective is gained on the smallness of man and the vastness of Hashem's world. It's interesting is that this is only the universe observable to the human eye, constituting a minimal part of the actual universe, which we cannot even see.

The Kabbalistic teachings inform us that the vast universe that exists (even beyond our comprehension) is just a tiny world—the material world of action—among countless spiritual worlds that exist. These worlds are not physical places but spiritual levels of a different kind of awareness, which we do not begin to understand. In these worlds, there are countless angels, high and mighty consciousness particles, who experience reality in a state of unity rather than separation, like us. If the observable universe seems large, it turns out there is an almost infinite reality we fail to capture.

This is also Maimonides' "recipe" for attaining love and awe of Hashem: "And how is the way to love and fear Him? When a person contemplates His great actions and wondrous creations, and sees in them His wisdom, beyond estimate and limit, he will immediately love, praise, and glorify and long with tremendous desire to know the great Name, as David said: 'My soul thirsts for Hashem, the living God.' And when he thinks about these very things, he will immediately recoil and fear and realize he is a small, insignificant, and dark creature, standing with little knowledge before the perfect knowledge, as David said: 'When I see Your heavens... what is man, that You are mindful of him.' (Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 2).

Spending a few minutes before prayer in guided imagination and thought about both the immense size of the physical world and the spiritual world can elevate us to a level of consciousness that allows us to pray with intent. I do not know if these were the thoughts of the early pious ones, but there is no doubt that they assist in entering prayer with solemnity.