This week’s Torah portion, Toldot, opens, “And Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rivka… And Isaac prayed to God opposite his wife because she was barren, and God responded to his prayer, and Rivka became pregnant.”
The word for prayer here is not the normal word that is used, lehitpalel or lehitchanen, to pray or ask, but va’yeetar. What does this word mean?
Rashi says that the word va’yeetar means to “heap up” or “increase.” But why is this word used here for prayer? The word is used in only one other place in the Torah—with regard to Pharaoh asking God to remove the plagues—and there it is used repeatedly. For instance, in Exodus 8:4, “and Pharaoh called to Moses and Aaron and said ‘he’etiru el Hashem, pray to God and remove the frogs from our midst.’” Over and over, this verb is used for each plague—frogs, wild beasts, hail, and locusts—to indicate asking God to remove them from the Egyptians.
The verb appears again in the book of Chronicles (33:13). When Menashe, the wicked king of Judah, is punished and exiled, he prays to God, and God grants his prayer. The word for Menashe’s prayer to God is va’yeetar.
A fourth time that the word is used is in the story of Manoach and his wife in Judges 13:8. An angel appears to the wife of Manoach, the mother-to-be of Samson, and tells her she will have a child, and he will be a Nazirite. Manoach, her husband, does not believe her. He is incredulous and asks God to send the angel again so he can be sure; he does not trust his wife and does not seem to trust the angel. The word used for Manoach’s request is va’yeetar.
The similarity between Manoach, Pharaoh and Menashe is that they don’t really pray to God because they do not really believe and trust in God. They just want something from God, so they pile on; they throw things at the wall and hope it works. This is not direct praying or beseeching, but more transactional.
We can understand that wicked people, such as Pharaoh and Menashe, and faithless, untrusting people, such as Manoach, may not have the capacity to reach out and pray to God with humility, intimacy and trust, and so this unusual word is used, “va’yeetar,” “they piled up,” indicating a piling up of words or reasons, but no true prayer or communication. But what is it about Isaac that holds him back from prayer?
The Akedah creates a block between Avraham and God. The free intimate flow of communication between them changes and God and Avraham never speak after the Akedah. This seems to be the case with Yitzchak also since he too does not talk to God except here, where the word used is not really prayer but something more transactional, va’yeetar.
Prayer comes from a place of hope and possibility. In fact, the Gemara says that you can only pray for something that is possible, that is as yet still in potentia. For instance, a husband may not pray that his child be a certain sex after his wife is already pregnant (Berakhot 60a). In a way, Yitzchak is separated from the sense of what is possible, of the future. He is stuck to the Akedah, to the altar. As the Midrash Tanchuma (Vayera 23) puts it, “The ashes of Isaac are piled on the altar.”
To truly pray to God as a “Thou,” there must be an “I.” If I am only a sacrifice, this may be spiritual, noble and humble, but I will only be able to pile up my requests before God (va’yeetar); I will not be able to truly pray. Prayer, tefilah, takes a full-fledged I who can stand in intimate relationship with the great Thou.