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Avraham’s servant prays to G-d for a miracle, with great specificity. He expects that the right girl should be the one who is carrying a jar, who voluntarily serves him as well as the camels (who drink vast amounts of water). There is no prayer in the Torah so detailed – let alone answered in every particular!
As he retells the story to Lavan, “Before I had finished praying,” Rivkah arrives and every single particular element of his prayer comes to fruition.
Why? Why is this unnamed servant granted this divine miracle? Nobody else in the Torah ever had something like this happen to them: none of the forefathers or foremothers, not Moshe or Aharon – none of them! Even when they were praying for the sake of others, as the servant was doing.
Why does this one person merit such an answer to his prayers?
I think the answer ties into the nature of the prayer itself. The servant is not merely “calling out in the name of Hashem” as others have done. He has not externalized his prayer, thinking of G-d as some external deity.
No. The phrase in the verse is quite specific. While it is translated as “before I finished praying,” the actual words are “לְדַבֵּ֣ר אֶל־לִבִּ֗י” which literally translates as “speaking to my heart.”
Is it possible that the servant had innovated a new form of prayer, one that we have emulated ever since? He took his divinely-gifted breath (G-d ensouls Adam with a breath, after all), and spoke to his heart, to his body.
The servant has shown us that prayer is actually about combining our spirits and our bodies. About infusing our hearts (physical desires) with words. About elevating the physical with the spiritual.
Does the servant essentially invent the ideal form of prayer in this story? If so, doesn’t it make sense that G-d would reward such an innovation with a full and immediate granting of the prayer itself?
Isn’t the servant's supplication at the very heart of all of Judaism? Infusing our own bodies and the world at large with words – along with all the holy concepts, yearnings for kindness and divine connection that can be expressed with those words? This seems to be an epochal development!
Discussion