The waiting room of prayer

 Photo courtesy of Paul Denton Crocker

Gikatilla brings up a very interesting idea. Malchut is the gateway to the spherot. It's intimately connected with yesod. All of the higher spherot feed down into yesod which joins with malchut. Malchut, though it it thought of us as empty on it's own, distributes the shefa to the world that it received from Yesod.

The process also works in reverse. When a person prays by themselves, the prayers go up through malchut into Yesod. Yesod has gatekeepers who evaluate the prayers to see if they are worthy of going up to God. How are they evaluated? If the prayers are done with the proper intention and feeling. And if they are not deemed worthy? Then they go to the waiting room. The prayers are not thrown out or discarded, but placed in a special place, a Geniza,  a waiting room. When the person prays with proper intention the gates of prayer open and all of the prayers that have been in the waiting room get brought before God.

He also writes that the gates of heaven are always open to tears. When a person cries while praying, or prays while crying, the prayers go straight up to Heaven and are not held up by the gatekeeper in Yesod. Likewise, when we pray in a minyan, then the prayers go upwards. The gathering calls the shechina so the prayers are automatically thought to be accepted.

This is a fascinating idea.