Why Are Jewish Prayers OBSESSED With Stars? | The Hidden Meaning Of Tefillah

If you take a look through our tefillos, you'll notice something strange. We seem to give an unusually large amount of attention to [music] stars and planets. They seem to be forever taking center stage. Right at the beginning of the morning birchos krias shema, we jump straight to talking about stars and planets when we say Why? Every night in maariv, before we say shema, we say In kel adonai shabbos, we again praise Hashem for the sun, the moon, and the stars. Again and again and again throughout tefillah, we talk about heavens and stars and constellations and celestial bodies. And the question is obvious. Why? Of all the things we could thank Hashem for, why do we choose the stars and the planets to focus on? Why not focus on our praise and things that we actually [music] feel, like our health, our children, our homes, our food, our families? Why not focus on the countless miracles we actually experience every single day? Why? Why would the thing we understand the least become one of the things we praise Hashem for the most? Perhaps the answer is because there's nothing in all of creation that screams Hashem more than the stars. [music] Think about it. Humanity has been trying to figure out the stars for thousands of years. The greatest scientists who ever lived [music] devoted their entire careers to understanding them. We've built telescopes larger than buildings to figure them out. We've sent spacecrafts in every direction to try to understand them. And yet, despite it all, we know essentially nothing about the universe. There is arguably nothing in all of human history and nothing in the entire natural world that we know less about. Stars refuse to fit inside our understanding. They refuse to be reduced to a neat explanation. Thousands of years into human history, they still stare down at us with the same mystery and grandeur and unanswered questions as they did 5,000 years ago. And perhaps that's exactly why they appear so often in tfila. Because tfila is not about understanding everything. Tfila often begins when understanding [music] ends. A woman sits in fertility clinic after years of unanswered prayers, she doesn't understand, yet she davens anyway. A man wheels his son into surgery, he doesn't understand, yet he davens anyway. A teenager struggles with a million questions he can't answer, he doesn't understand, yet he davens anyway. A businessman watches years of work just collapse overnight, he has no idea, he doesn't understand, yet he davens anyway. That is tfila. Tfila is looking at a world you can't explain, looking at a life you can't fully understand, looking at stars that are so vast and incomprehensible, they make your mind spin and say, "Ribbono shel Olam, I don't understand, I don't understand the heavens, I don't understand the stars, I don't understand the planets, I don't understand everything happening in my life, but I know that you do. >> [music] >> I know you're behind it all, and for that I thank you and I sing your praise." Perhaps our tfilos keep returning to the stars because every time we mention them, we are declaring the deepest truth a Jew can say, "Hashem, I don't need to understand [music] everything to praise you. I don't need to understand everything to trust you. I don't need to understand everything to daven to you." >> [music] >> Tfila is not saying, "Hashem, give me all the answers." Tfila is saying, "Hashem, even without the answers, I praise you, I cry to you, I sing to you, no matter what and no matter [music] when."