The Sound of Heaven

A lot of us find it hard to pray, because from our vantage point of down “here”, we simply can't begin to understand how powerful and effective our prayers are. The following astounding story underlines the amazing power of prayer.

A few years' ago, during the second Intifada, Israel was suffering through a number of horrendous terrorist attacks and suicide bus bombings. One day, a bus exploded in Jerusalem, and there was a lot of tragedy on that bus. Tens of people were maimed and killed. One woman “died” at the scene, and her soul lifted out of the bus and is the soul's nature, started ascending.

As she rose higher and higher, she could see down on the street, where the still smoking wreckage of the bus was, with hundreds of people running around and sirens blaring, but she felt as though she was completely detached from it all and didn't have a connection to what was going on. She wanted to continue going up.

She could see the earth as a small globe beneath her, and she was going higher and higher, when she suddenly began to hear the most beautiful music she had ever heard in her life. The music was so compelling, she had to follow it and come closer to it. The music was coming from the earth, and this woman had to fight her way back down, because the force pulling her higher was incredibly strong.

As she came down, she came nearer to the source of the music, and she saw she was being directed to a traffic jam a few blocks away from where the bus had exploded; and sitting in that traffic jam was a particular car, and in that car was a woman who was sobbing with grief over a book of psalms. That woman was praying for all the people who had just been caught up in the explosion.

As soon as she saw that woman praying, the “dead” woman was instantaneously jolted back in to her body, and found that she was in a hospital bed, with a bunch of doctors and nurses frantically trying to stabilize her condition. It took that lady a long time to get well again, but when she was finally discharged from the hospital, she was on a mission.

She went to a hypnotherapist, and asked him to age-regress her to the time of the bombing, so that she could remember all of the details of her NDE, near-death or “out of body” experience. He did – and during the session, she remembered the license plate number of the woman who had been saying psalms in her car.

She tracked the owner down, and went to her house to speak with her. The woman invited her in. She explained that she'd been in such-and-such bus bombing, a few months' ago, and she asked the woman in front of her: "When the bombing happened, where were you?" The lady told her that she was in her car when the bus bombing happened, and as the city exploded in the multiple ambulance sirens that told everyone that there had been another terrorist attack, she'd been sitting in her car, praying for all the latest victims.

The first woman got very emotional, and explained that those prayers had saved her life. "Do you know what those Psalms sounded like, up in Heaven? I couldn't resist following them back to their source – and it's only because of you that I came back, and that I'm alive today!"

All of us have this tremendous power of prayer within us, too. Maybe, we don't yet know its value, or the effect it can have on our own lives and on other people – but our prayers can literally save lives! Our prayers can work tremendous miracles and make enormous differences to the world, even if we ourselves can't directly or immediately see that happening.

Even if it appears to us that our prayers are going unanswered, we should remember two things: firstly, they just haven't been answered yet. Secondly, even if we can't see what good they are doing for us, what impact they are having, we can still be sure that they are helping countless other people around the globe. No word of prayer is going to waste, and each additional word is helping us to build the vessels that we need for Hashem to actually answer our prayers.

We just have to carry on living with emuna, and belief in Hashem, and to know that each prayer we utter is a wondrously beautiful, powerful thing, that's bringing us a step closer to getting unstuck, and unlocking our own potential, power and happiness.