Praying Via the Land

And you shall fear the Lord your God; Him shall you serve; and to Him you shall cleave, and by His name shall you swear.                                      Deuteronomy 10:20

            Sefer haḤinuch [mitzva 431] cites the phrase “Him shall you serve” from our verse as the source of the positive mitzva to pray to God.

            Maimonides [Sefer haMitzvot, positive commandment 5] adds:

The Sages (Sifrei on our verse) also say: “Serve Him through His Torah and serve Him in His sanctuary,” which means that you should aspire to pray either in the Temple or towards it, as Solomon clearly said [I Kings 8:30].

            The Talmud [B’rachot, 30a], in a comment codified in the Halacha [Shulḥan Aruch Oraḥ Ḥayyim 84:2], phrases the point thus:

If he is standing (in prayer) outside the Land, he should incline   his   heart  towards   Eretz Yisrael,   as  the  verse [I Kings 8:48] states: “and pray to You towards their Land;” if he stands in Israel, he should incline his heart towards Jerusalem; as the verse [ibid. 44] says, “And they pray unto the Lord toward the city which You have chosen;” if he is standing in Jerusalem he should turn mentally towards the sanctuary, as the verse [II Chronicles 6:26] says, “they pray toward this house.” … In this way all Israel will incline their hearts towards one place.

            Rabbi Yehonatan Eybschutz has a slightly different reading of the relevant verse from Kings [8:48], understanding it to mean “and pray to You via their Land,” and explains that when one prays outside Israel, his intention must be that his prayer be routed through the Holy Land, whence it will reach God. Rabbi Yehonatan goes further, and states that since in accordance with Naḥmanides’ opinion (based upon Sifrei) that mitzva observance is mandatory only in the Land, when a Jew outside Israel performs a mitzva, his intent and thought must be that it is as if he were standing in the Holy Land, and performing the mitzva there.

            Rabbi Yehonatan concludes with the prayer that by virtue of the thought and intention of performing mitzvot within the Holy Land, and that his mitzva, as it were, passing through the Land, “and this is what his heart and eyes seek,” that he be privileged to see the Land with his own eyes and experience its pure air.