Prayer is always a conversation with God.
It is the way we relate feelings, fears or aspirations, or make requests.
There is also prayer for one's community, for one's own nation or for the world as a whole.
And prayer can also be a different sort of conversation: an urge to say thank you, to say: how good it is that You are there.
We pray to God; in some ways, He answers us with decisions about our fates.
Every person's private reckoning, either for the good or for the bad, is far too complex, and no one is able to appraise oneself properly, let alone appraise others.
Every year, there is a time of Judgment (on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, and also later) in which one's fate for the coming year is generally determined.
But these judgments are not absolutely decisive.
Judgment and verdict are according to man's state at that particular moment in time.
When one makes a dramatic change in life, either for better or for worse, one's verdict changes accordingly.
The "book" in which God "writes and seals" judgments is, in a way, like word-processing on a computer: on any day, at any time, it is possible to change, delete and rewrite.
More than that – we can appeal.
Human beings have the right (perhaps also the duty) to converse with God, to ask things from Him and also to complain to Him, to claim: "You're not right."
It is the same right that a child has to cry and to say, "Why do other kids get more?"
A human being is entitled to complain. God wants us to be honest with Him.
But still and all, He cannot be judged.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From an essay, "Each of Us Has a Personal Relationship with God" by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz