“Pray as if everything depended on God. Act as if everything depended on you.”

May 16, 2025

“Pray as if everything depended on God. Act as if everything depended on you.” These words can be found in Mishkan T’filah, the Reform movement’s prayerbook, on page 165, but their true origin is more obscure. The editors of Mishkan T’filah attribute them to Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman, a Reform rabbi in the early 20th century. But if you ask “Rav Google” who said or wrote these words, you find that many people cite St. Ignatius, the 16th-century Italian priest who founded the Jesuit order, or St. Augustine, the great North African theologian of the 4th century. We’ll probably never know its true source, but what is clear is that the saying is timeless – it is just as likely that it was coined in the 4th century as in the 20th. So let’s think about why this saying has such staying power, and why the editors of the Reform prayerbook decided to include it.

“Pray as if everything depended on God. Act as if everything depended on you.” What does it mean to pray as if everything depended on God? First, it suggests a posture of humility. We approach God as the Omnipotent One, in comparison to our smallness. At the beginning of the Amidah, the central prayer of our liturgy, it’s customary to take three steps forward and bow. The image is that we are entering into God’s throne room to approach the Sovereign. In prayer, we throw ourselves at God’s feet, so to speak, whether in gratitude or penitence or petition. Humility is an essential trait for those who seek a relationship with the Divine. After all, the first step in having a relationship with God is acknowledging that we ourselves are not God.

Second, praying as if everything depended on God requires a suspension of disbelief or doubt. “As if” is the operative phrase. Judaism doesn’t require an absolute certainty about the existence or nature of God. You don’t have to know that God is omnipotent, or that God intervenes in the world, or even that God exists. Prayer isn’t the time for scientific study or critical thinking. It is the time to set aside our skepticism and cynicism, and maybe even our rational thinking, to make space for other things: imagination, emotion, connection, pure presence. 

And third, praying as if everything depended on God suggests a certain fervor, a certain piety that, let’s face it, may seem a little over the top to many liberal Jews. But replace fervor with effort, and we learn another lesson about prayer: it’s difficult, and it requires practice. If we take prayer seriously, we have to try to get better at it. We don’t expect to pick up an instrument for the first time and play a concerto, so we shouldn’t expect to walk into a synagogue, open the prayerbook, and immediately have a transcendent spiritual experience. As Rabbi Reuven Hammer writes, “Prayer should always be a combination of set words and spontaneous expression. We utilize the magnificent texts that others have written and we add to them.... Since expression in prayer is so difficult, when geniuses have left us such a rich heritage it seems wasteful not to utilize their words.... On the other hand, there is a danger in using words simply because they are there, not understanding them or not investing them with meaning.... Using traditional prayer therefore requires us to bring meaning to the sounds we utter. That meaning can be on the emotional level or the cognitive one, or a combination of both.... The more we understand the words and what lies behind them, the greater the opportunity to use them well.

Pray as if everything depended on God. Pray with humility, pray with an open mind and heart, pray with effort and intention. And once our prayers have been said and we walk out into the world? Then we act as if everything depended on us.

This is not a negation of the first half of the saying. Acting as if everything depends on us doesn’t mean that we’re meant to spend all this time recognizing and connecting with a Higher Power when we’re in synagogue and then forget about all that as soon as we cross the threshold into the world. It does mean that we should be clear about our expectations for God and for our prayers. If we pray to God for peace on earth, for example, and then consider our jobs done and do nothing to pursue peace ourselves, we’re most likely going to be disappointed. There is a well-known midrash about Moses and the Israelites at the Red Sea. Moses is standing at the water’s edge, praying fervently to God for salvation. “The Holy One, Blessed be He, said to him: ‘My beloved ones are drowning in the sea and you prolong your prayer to me?!’ Moses said: ‘Master of the Universe, but what can I do?’ God said to him: ‘Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward. And you, lift up your rod and stretch out your hand’” (Exodus 14:15–16). Even Moses’ prayer isn’t sufficient to bring about salvation. Only action – marching forward – makes freedom possible. Acting as if everything depended on us  requires a sense of personal responsibility. None of us is allowed to pass the buck or think “that’s not my problem.” If everything depends on us, it’s always our problem. 

That’s a pretty heavy burden, one that not many of us have the capacity to carry for very long. Fortunately, we can read our saying in the plural: act as if everything depended on all of you. It is a responsibility meant to be shared. Furthermore, we have to remember both halves of the saying, for the first half is what makes the second half possible. Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, “One of the things that constantly reassures me that God is real, and not just an idea that religious leaders made up, is the fact that people who pray for strength, hope and courage so often find the resources of strength, hope and courage that they did not have before they prayed.” Pray as if everything depended on God. Act as if everything depended on you. May our prayers give us the strength, hope, and courage we need in order to perform the acts of kindness and justice that our world so desperately needs.