A person may think he is in communion with holiness, in a state of divine love or fear – yet he is experiencing no more than illusions: not an experience coming from a true inner soul connection, but from an almost physiological phenomenon. A person finds himself in a certain atmosphere, in the company of others who enhance that mood; he is exposed to music or scents, and he responds. By way of analogy, sometimes when one person yawns, everyone else follows suit – not because they are tired, but simply as an imitative mechanism.

The same can occur in prayer: a Jew wraps himself in a prayer shawl and sways back and forth, and he imagines that he is religiously moved; the focus and tension caused by the atmosphere, by the fact that he is standing and reciting words of prayer, appear to him to be a meaningful experience. He may sing as he prays and believe that he has been swept up in the love of God – but in truth this might be merely an external movement – a prayer tune but not a prayer.

This is a serious concern. A person who is sincerely attempting to find his way to his inner being should indeed make use of external means to reach a state of concentrated attention. But since those means may arouse counterfeit emotions, how can he know if his intense feelings of prayer are true or delusory? The answer is that “the lip of truth will be established forever” (Proverbs 12:19). Something that is true lasts; truth has permanence, and falsehood is transitory.

A false prayer experience may be compared to the phenomenon known as false pregnancy. A woman shows all the signs of pregnancy, from morning sickness to an extended belly to birth pangs; but in the end there is nothing – only the illusion of pregnancy. The proof of authenticity is whether something has been brought into the world. If there is nothing but air, then there was nothing but air from the very beginning.

If after religious rapture passes, nothing remains, the absence of emotion indicates that all along it was no more than the imitation of true feeling. The value of a person’s prayer lies not in how much he cried out, how much he swayed, nor even how strong his emotions were, but in what remains of his experience after the prayers are over.

The rebbe of Kotzk, a Hasidic master from eastern Poland, commented on the Yishtabach blessing from the Jewish prayer book as follows: The prayer states that God “chooses musical songs.” The Hebrew word for “musical” – shirei – can be related to shirayim – meaning, “remains.” God chooses not “songs” but what remains after that song is over. If the song is true, it does not fade; if the feeling is genuine, it will leave a resonance. These “remains” are not necessarily something intellectual or even emotional; they are merely an impression of something that had been. And the indication of whether the experience left such an impression is whether some change has been wrought in the individual. If the answer is yes, that is all the proof that is needed to show that this was indeed a genuine experience.

It is important to distinguish between truth and delusion in prayer not only because it would be a shame to misrepresent ourselves to God (or to deceive ourselves), but because it is dangerous. There is a law in economics that bad pennies drive out the good ones. So it is in spiritual life. False experiences drive out true feelings. When a person is filled with illusory sensations, he loses the ability to identify a genuine sensation. Had he experienced no emotions whatsoever, he would at least have been aware of that; but if he falsely imagines that he is experiencing feeling or that he is genuinely praying, then he no longer has the chance to attain true emotion. And so in order to allow himself to experience an authentic sensation, he must actively work to give up any false emotions that he has.

Excerpted from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s The Thirteen Petalled Rose, published by Basic Books (2006).