Shavuot 5786
Raacheli Fried, a Los Angeles native and resident of East Denver, organized a “Tehillim group,” a Psalms group, 11 years ago. People in the group recite Psalms for many reasons, among them a “complete healing,” a refuah shelemah, for sick people. A Tehillim group may also be organized to pray for a single person, as Essie Fleischmann has done.
Raacheli Fried: A Tehillim group is a group of people, very commonly women, but it doesn’t need to be exclusively women. In fact, my father’s grandfather used to say the whole book of Psalms every single day. So it’s for men and women.
The idea of doing it in a group is to pray. We pray for people who are ill. The illness could be physical or mental. Sometimes there are people going through some mental illness and they need some prayers said for them, but mostly it is for people who are physically ill.
Question: What is the connection between the recitation of Psalms and prayers for the ill?
Fried: The person who wrote Psalms was David HaMelech, King David, who in his life went through highs and went through lows. He understood emotions, he understood feelings, and he was able to take those feelings and turn them into prayers. Very often when someone is ill, you don’t have the words to turn to G-d. The Psalms enable you to turn to G-d, to ask for help for that person to be well. We don’t necessarily have the words to properly articulate what’s needed.
There are different Psalms for different needs. There are Psalms for times of war. For illness. For basically every part of life. The Psalms give the words that maybe it’s hard to come up with when you’re dealing with a loved one who is ill and you feel helpless. G-d forbid someone has cancer or a long-term illness or something that is very sudden. Psalms give the words that sometimes you can’t formulate, you can’t think of on your own. Psalms give you the words to communicate that to G-d.
Q: Does a Tehillim group meet in the same room?
A: There are different ways of doing it. Sometimes they’re together in the same house. Some people have done it over the phone.
What’s become very popular, probably since COVID, is a WhatsApp group, basically not set in one city.
Q: What happens in the group?
There are 150 chapters in the book of Psalms. Some groups divide them into seven segments, one for each day of the week, and a group member will take one segment to recite. Some divide the 150 chapters into five segments, because the book of Psalms itself is divided into five segments. Some divide the book into 24 segments; this makes it easier for people who are not so familiar with Psalms. Each segment of the whole book can be individualized to a person’s preference, ability or familiarity with certain psalms.
After the completion of the 150 psalms, there is a concluding prayer, which basically says, we’ve completed the whole book and it should be as if we’ve recited the five books of the Torah, based on the five divisions in the book of Psalms. There is space in the prayer to insert the names of sick people, to be healed in the merit of the completion of the whole book of Psalms.
Some groups say the concluding prayer, some don’t.
Members of the group are constantly saying Tehillim. We have people in our group who live in Israel. It could be late in Denver, we’re all asleep, but someone in Israel is saying Tehillim as well. So there’s always someone in the group who is praying. In our group we have people from all over the East Side.
I loved it when we did it in person — maybe COVID interrupted it — but WhatsApp is powerful, too. For example, after October 7, there were so many cycles of Tehillim continuously being said.
If someone is having surgery, you don’t necessarily know that person. You know the family member, but not necessarily the person. And that’s the beauty about these Tehillim groups. A Jew is a Jew. Tehillim groups bring not only a connection with Hashem but a connection with people, with the Jewish people. Showing caring and sensitivity — it doesn’t matter if I don’t know the person we’re praying for. The person needs the psalms being said for them.
It’s very powerful. You have this group that’s almost like a stream. You’re coming together for this person.
We don’t always get the results. It’s not a magic trick. People don’t always get better. But you know that those prayers have gone somewhere.
Thank G-d, more times than not, we see people get better.
Sometimes we take it for granted that we have this gift of prayer.
Prayer in shul can be lengthy and not everyone can sit that long. But everyone can pick up a single chapter of Tehillim. They could say it in English, they could say it in Hebrew. And they’ve connected. They’ve made a connection with G-d.
Q: Do the people who are being prayed for know they are being prayed for?
A: That’s a good question. I don’t know about everyone. It depends. Yes, some people know. Some are very private — they’d be embarrassed to know.
I don’t know if everyone knows because I don’t personally know all the people on our list. I would hope it would give them a boost to know that everyone’s praying for them.
Q: Where does the list come from?
A: It comes from the members in the group. A member says, I think we should pray for this person and another member says we should pray for that person. So the list builds. And sometimes, unfortunately, we have to take names off the list because they’ve passed on.
But also the opposite: they come off the list because they don’t need those prayers anymore. Everyone in the group will be encouraged and excited.
Our Tehillim group has created a community within the larger East Side community, even if we don’t see each other every day. Sometimes you could go weeks maybe not seeing everyone in the group. And, like I said, someone in Israel is part of the group, saying Psalms.
Q: Does the articulation of the prayer include the name of the person who is being prayed for?
A: It’s just their Hebrew name [not their English name or last name].
Q: How many members are in the group?
A: There are 55 people. They’re not necessarily all active. Most of them are from the East Side of Denver. We had a couple who made aliyah and they wanted to stay part of the group.
Q: How often does your Tehillim group meet?
A: Daily, except for Shabbos. On our WhatsApp group, we’re not doing it at one time. Some groups will meet at a particular hour. On our group you can go and say Psalms at any point during the day, when you want to. Sometimes people say, “Oh, I have five minutes,” and they recite psalms for five minutes; or they say one chapter. One person might participate at eight in the morning, and another one at ten at night. It goes on over the course of the day.
Q: Do you have any idea how Tehillim groups started?
A: I don’t. I would like to do some research on that, where they started.
Q: So, you grew up and Tehillim groups were there?
A: I grew up with it in high school. Here’s what happened:
Word was received that a woman in Jerusalem was in danger of death during childbirth. My mother and a few friends recited Psalms for her recovery. On three separate times occasions her life was in danger. She pulled through.
It turns out that there was a Tehillim group in Los Angeles, and when it heard the story it encouraged my mother and her friends to form their own Tehillim group. So they did.
My mother went every single week, and she would bring me. Then the person who ran it could no longer do it and asked my mother to take over. She did, for many years. Today, she wouldn’t miss it.
My mother’s Tehilllim group meets on Zoom, so there’s another option for everyone to say the psalms at the same time. They’re all in the same city, but they’re not in the same house.
So as you see there’s definitely different formats of how people do it. The one that I love the most, the most powerful, is when we physically met in person, but it’s challenging for people who don’t want to do it late and for people like me putting kids to sleep. Someone who’s part of the group recently said, “you know, I really liked coming in person,” and I said, “I need to think about how we can make that happen again, because it was just such a nice way to bring people together — united in this front of powerfulness.
There is also a website that tells you the chapter to say, and shows you the chapter, and when you finish, it gives you the next one. Some people use that as well.
After high school, when I was in Stern College, I ran a small Tehillim group there.
Q: Is one or more chapters of Psalms particularly meaningful to you?
A: None in particular. But take Chapter 119 [whose verses are alphabetically sequenced]. When someone is critically ill, the verses that spell out the person’s Hebrew name are recited. I find that very powerful because I feel like you’re elevating the soul when you do that.
Q: Last thoughts?
A: I really think that what’s so powerful is that King David was the one who wrote it. It wasn’t someone who was only a poet, but was a poet who went through such challenging times in his life. It is so poignant that he was able to be the one to write it because it’s almost like he understood — he had such a deep understanding of people and their feelings, and of his own relationship to Hashem. I think it’s amazing that the world continues to change — even in one day you can have so many different emotions and feelings, and I feel like I need to speak to Hashem, but I don’t know how because I can be overwhelmed by the craziness of our world. And you open up the Psalms! You see what he wrote. Even though he wrote it thousands of years ago, it’s so relevant today.
It’s such a gift that was given to us.
By reciting Psalms, It’s almost like you’re giving a hug to the people on the list, and you realize this isn’t a list. It’s people and their lives and their families.
We’ve really seen so many miracles. You want to believe that when people come together, we can see this. We see this throughout history — in the story of Purim, in the story of Pesach, when we came together and we prayed together. Our reality changed.
It makes sense that these groups are formed because that is what Hashem wants us to do. He wants to find ways to bring us together. Why are we in galus [exile]? Because we’re divided. And the only way we’re going to get out of it is if we learn to come together.
© IJN 2026