Chapter 28: Foreign Thoughts in the Middle of Prayer

In chapter 27, a bad thought that comes while a person is at work or busy with ordinary things was good news: pushing it away is a mitzvah. That answer does not help in the middle of prayer. There he is already doing a mitzvah, and the thought is getting in its way. This chapter deals with that.

A “foreign thought” here is anything foreign to the prayer: a craving, but also business, plans or worries. And the chapter speaks of a person who is really trying to pray with kavanah, with attention to what he is saying. That is when a foreign thought is felt as an interruption.

The first instruction is practical. Give the thought no attention and move away from it immediately. In practice the way to leave a thought is not to tell yourself not to think it, which only keeps it there, but to put your mind back on something else: the next words of the prayer.

“Raising the middos” was a known teaching. Every thought comes from one of the soul’s emotions (middos): a craving comes from love; hatred, and fears that are out of place, come from fear; and so on. The method is to notice which emotion is behind the thought and turn that same emotion toward G‑d. If something looks desirable, its desirability is really the divine power within it, so love that, not the thing. In this way the emotion is raised to its holy source.

The Alter Rebbe does not deny that the method is valid, but it belongs to tzaddikim. For anyone else, trying it is foolishness. A tzaddik’s own emotions have already become good, so a bad thought that comes to him is not his own. It belongs to someone else whose soul is connected to his and who needs help. It reaches him only as bare “letters of thought”, with no feeling of evil attached, so he can raise it, and in this way help that person.

A beinoni is in a different position. His thought grows from his own animal soul, and he is still drawn to the very thing it shows him. A mashal: at an exhibition hung a painting of a barking dog so real that people recoiled from it in fear. Only someone not gripped by the fear could stand back and see it as a work of art. In the same way, only someone whom the craving does not grip can look past it to the divine energy inside. The beinoni is gripped by it, “bound below”. If he tries to work with it, it will pull him down. For him the advice is simply to move on.

Here is the real danger. The prayer was going well, and suddenly the mind is somewhere else entirely. A person concludes that everything he felt a moment ago was false, and he becomes sad and feels worthless. The Alter Rebbe says the opposite: pray with more joy than before.

The reason is the rule of every fight. While one side is not really fighting, the other side has no reason to fight either. The moment one side starts to win, the other wakes up and throws in everything it has. So the foreign thought does not show that the prayer was empty. It shows that the G‑dly soul was getting strong enough for the kelipah, the evil side of the animal soul, to feel threatened. That itself is a reason for joy and for pressing on.

The mistake sounds reasonable. If my heart were really in the prayer, how could my mind wander to my bills? With one soul that would be true: a soul fully absorbed in prayer would have no room for anything else.

But a person has two souls, and the mind is both their battlefield and the prize. The prayer comes from the G‑dly soul and the foreign thought from the animal soul. The thought says nothing about the prayer, any more than the enemy’s attack says something about the soldier’s loyalty.

Why can one soul disturb the other at all? Because the G‑dly soul is clothed in the animal soul. They share one mind, so the G‑dly soul cannot simply ignore what rises from the other. The battle here is not between mind and heart but inside the mind itself.

Think of the man in the mashal. The point is his intent: he is there only to disturb you. If someone only wanted to know the time, you could tell him and be rid of him. But this man is there to disturb you. Answer one question and he will ask another. Argue with him and he has won. The only answer is no answer.

So with the foreign thought. The mistake is not only to follow it. It is also to argue with it, to analyze where it came from, or to tell it “I know why you are here, and I won’t listen.” All of that is attention, and attention is what it wants. Even “I will not think about you” keeps it in the mind. Wrestling with it, the mind fills up with it and is soiled.

The mashal also teaches something else. If a man is shouting at you while you pray, it says nothing about your prayer. Someone is trying to disturb it, that is all. The foreign thought is the same: a disturbance from outside the praying soul, not a flaw in the prayer.

Sometimes the thoughts are too strong to put aside. Then the beinoni turns to G‑d, silently, in the middle of his prayer, and asks for help.

He asks as a child asks a father. A father’s pity for his child is not like pity for a stranger, because the child comes from the father’s own mind. The G‑dly soul, as explained in chapter 2, comes from G‑d’s “mind”, His wisdom. The “raging waters” are the thoughts that threaten to drown it.

“For His own sake He will do it” can be read in two ways. It may be part of the plea: help me not because I deserve it, but because my soul is part of You, so in helping it You help Yourself, as it were. Or it may be a promise: G‑d will surely help, for the soul truly is part of Him.

There is a lesson in this too. People usually ask G‑d for help with what is out of their hands, like health or a livelihood, and treat their own spiritual growth as a matter of trying harder. Here, in the middle of the inner work itself, the advice is to admit “I cannot do this alone” and ask. That takes humility, and it is part of serving Him.