In this week’s Torah reading of Vayera, Abraham forcefully expresses his objections to God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Their extended negotiation is, by the standards of the Hebrew Bible, a lengthy piece of dialogue. Through a close reading of the passage, Sruli Fruchter tries to uncover some of its significance. He also notes the interpretive problem that stems from Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook’s comment, echoed by other important sages, that “it is necessary that prayer be clean of any idea of changing will and affecting response in God’s law.”
What Rabbi Kook writes . . . unequivocally contradicts the story of Sodom. Abraham prayed for Sodom. He explicitly sought to change God’s will. He hoped to change God’s decree. Kook’s words apparently attribute his actions to the “destruction of the order of man’s perfection.” For Kook, to suggest that one can “better” God by proposing new suggestions or demanding new realities is tantamount to heresy, for it essentially depends on denying God’s omniscience: if one’s argument and plea is “new information” to God, then He cannot be all-knowing, and if God already knows one’s forthcoming words, then God already accounted for them. The first case denies God, and the second case denies prayer.
Prayer, then, as Samson Raphael Hirsch, Kook, and others write elsewhere, is an exercise of self-transformation, the realization of God’s highest ideals within the praying human.
While the face of Sodom’s trial appears a parry of equals, of God and human, its reality conveys a truth of human prayer. To face injustice and open the siddur is to yearn for God’s ideals of righteousness, compassion, and justice. Abraham’s grappling with God—his outrage over collective punishment, his indignation at divine wrongdoing, his recusal to humility, and his concession to reality—can be likened to the inner currents of one’s mind during prayer.
Read more on Lehrhaus: https://thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoughts/avraham-and-sodom-to-pray-against-god/