One who prays to change the past, says the Mishnah, "utters a vain prayer." A person should not beseech God to undo events that have already taken place, even when the outcome is still unknown. And yet there are circumstances where one is naturally tempted to do just that. Suppose, for instance, that I miss a crucial basketball game, but manage to avoid learning the final score. As I watch the replay, I may find myself not only rooting for my team, but actually praying for it. (One shouldn't bother God with basketball, but fans can be desperate.) Other, more wrenching circumstances can also tempt one to utter such backward-looking prayers. The Mishnah imagines a man returning home from a journey and hearing cries of distress. If he prays that the cries are not coming from his house, it is a vain prayer. Indeed, it would appear that even the more altruistic prayer that no one in the city has been harmed, whoever they may be, would also count as vain, according to the Mishnah. Whatever has happened has happened.

In a discussion of causality with the Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett, the great logician Georg Kreisel once characterized this passage from the Mishnah as holding that "it is blasphemous to pray that something should have happened, for, although there are no limits to God's power, He cannot do what is logically impossible," from which Dummett concluded that the Mishnah was in error.

But does the Mishnah's ruling on the limits of prayer relate to the limits of logic, or is something deeper at stake? Why does the Mishnah consider vain prayer to be such a bad thing, and what can it teach us about the nature of prayer? When is an event considered to have been concluded, a matter of the past, and when is it still open? This passage is discussed in both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, each of which offers a very different answer to these questions. But before turning to the Talmudic discussions, let us examine the larger and, I think, very revealing context in which this matter is discussed in the Mishnah.

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