In Gemara Berachot (5b) we learn a principle from Abba Binyamin that had obvious practical relevance in times when places of prayer were located outside areas of Jewish residence and there were neither street lights nor police patrols:
When two people enter [a synagogue]
to pray, and one of them finishes his prayer first and does not wait for the
other but leaves, his prayer is torn up in his face.
Since I am usually one of the last to finish my communal
prayers, this teaching means a lot to me. I can imagine a person struggling to
keep his mind on his prayer while resisting the constant urge to speed up and
make sure he has someone else to walk home with, mindful of the possible dangers
of walking home alone.
The Kerem Chemed of Rabbi Yehudah Rabinovitz brings
an entirely different explanation of this Gemara, which he heard from Rabbi
Yitzchak Yaakov Weiss ztz”l.
So how does one avoid this danger? Once again we cite Rabbi Shimon
ben Netanel’s teaching at Avot 2:18: “don’t make your prayer fixed [i.e.
routine or without feeling], but rather [think about] mercy and supplication”.
Incidentally, situations in which the mind leaves one’s
prayer while the body is still engaged in it crop up surprisingly often. One is
at weddings, when the maariv prayer has been called for after dinner,
but the band strikes up with a thumpingly loud dance number right in the middle
of one’s silent meditations. Another is when an impromptu minyan gets
together to pray during the half-time interval of a particularly exciting football
match. One is often faced with a choice between not praying at all, waiting to
pray at a later and more propitious time (if there is one), or praying with a
quorum but recognizing that one faces an uphill struggle to do much more than
articulate the words.
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