Prayer

I read among similar examples of a Rain King in Africa to whom the people pray for rain when the rainy period comes. But surely that means that they do not really believe that he can make it rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry periods of the year in which the land is “a parched and arid desert.” For if one assumes that the people formerly instituted this office of Rain King out of stupidity, it is nevertheless certainly clear that they had previously experienced that rains begin in March, and then they would have had the Rain King function for the other part of the year.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, discussing James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough

In The Limits of Prayer, Moshe Halbertal describes Wittgenstein’s understanding of prayer as an expressive gesture rather than a causal agent.  For the traditional scientific atheist, prayer is an irrational superstition, a holdover from the time before people understood how crops and rain cycles worked.  Wittgenstein demonstrates very simply why this understanding of prayer does not make sense.

Reading Halbertal’s article the day before leaving on tour, I realized I had never prayed before.  Not even once.  I do not know how to pray or to whom I should pray.  I still do not know.  I did not pray on tour.

Unsubstantiated theories about prayer:

1. The primary trauma of g-d’s death is the disappearance of prayer as a space of healing.  When you speak, no one is listening.  The sinking feeling that you are alone.  The trauma of freedom.  The disappearance of ritual.  The trauma of g-d’s death is not the lack of miracles; to pray for a miracle is to pray vainly.  The figure of g-d was a space of healing because it received prayer and listened unconditionally, not because it acted to end or prevent suffering.
2. Theodicy is still indecent.
3. As a secular reproduction of prayer, psychoanalysis failed.

Is a prayer for communism a vain prayer?  Please send your feelings on this question.