A friend leans over to you at services and whispers that a congregant is terminally ill. Regardless of your connection — close, remote, conflicted — shock levels the relational field.
When the Jewish prayer for healing arrives in the service, thoughts of this person permeate every word, line and hope.
The next week you learn that a 35-year-old synagogue member who has struggled with bipolar disorder since her teens is back in the psychiatric ward.
You reach out to her in the prayer for healing, encircling her like a balm.
A few months later, after a 23-year-tenure at the same firm, you suddenly lose your job.
Now it’s your time to pray — for your family, your children, yourself.
These scenarios find their rightful place in the Jewish prayer for healing, traditionally recited by Jews irrespective of denomination.
Jews who believe in G-d affirm the efficacy of the healing prayer.
Those treading uncertain spiritual ground are often caught between doubt and desire.
Nevertheless, they recite the prayer for healing
Physicians base their diagnoses on hard physical evidence.
Yet scientific research demonstrates that prayers for healing can have a positive effect on illness.
Prayers for healing originated in Judaism as a theological response similar to entreaties for rain during a drought. As time progressed, they evolved into pleas related to specific situations.
The communal healing prayer gradually moved into synagogue settings throughout Europe and the Middle East, where it accompanied the Torah reading.
There are healing prayers for every kind of illness and all manner of relationships, not to mention personally formulated prayers recited by Jews.
In 1943, a Hungarian community composed a prayer for Jews who suddenly disappeared from Budapest in the hopes that they would make a swift return.
The Jewish prayer for healing beseeches G-d for shlemut, or wholeness — a complete renewal of body and spirit.
We implore G-d to help us, our loved ones, friends and strangers who are struggling with physical illness.
If healing is no longer feasible, we may pray that they will find the strength to accept the inevitable.
People trapped in emotional and psychological crises are also in our prayers, for their pain is acutely real.
The Intermountain Jewish News solicited first-person reflections from members of the community on what the healing prayer means to them, the efficacy of prayer, inexplicable recoveries, and more.
Dr. Susan Heitler, Kohelet
I pray for healing at Shabbat services. I do believe G-d hears my prayer, in the sense that my G-d concept includes the interconnectedness of the energies of all living beings on this planet.
Our prayers can convey positive energy, hope and determination to heal people who are ill, including ourselves.
I know of a person who was healed by prayer. One of the members of our congregation was near death due to a complicated birth delivery. Our congregation gathered in the sanctuary to pray intensely on her behalf.
Suddenly, in the delivery room, her condition improved. From declining toward death, her condition reversed itself toward healing and life.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I have heard of individuals who prayed on their own behalf and received stunning, sudden healing.
We must pray for people afflicted with physical illnesses but also people suffering from emotional difficulties. Often the two go together.
I like that the Mi Shebeirach asks that we pray for the healing of both body and spirit.
The French philosopher Blaise Pascal elucidated what has become known as Pascal’s Wager:
If there is a G-d and I have lived my life believing in G-d, I am well off. If there is no G-d but I believe and act as if G-d exists, I still benefit from a life well lived. But if I don’t believe, I lose in either case.
I feel the same way about belief in the healing power of prayer.
Aliza Makovsky, DAT Minyan
When I was in the third grade, my Judaic studies teacher at DAT taught our class how to insert a short, personal prayer for healing into the broader prayer in the Shemoneh Esrei (Amidah).
At the time, I didn’t really know anyone to pray for so I usually omitted this optional supplication.
Two years later, on a trip to California for my cousin’s brit milah, my grandmother became very sick. Before this trip, she had been an active, youthful person.
She was two generations my elder, but I still saw her as full of life and capable of anything. I was a fifth grader. I thought she would be around forever.
When my parents tried to explain to their 10-year-old daughter that Savta was very ill, I imagined that she had the flu or maybe even a cold. But as time went on, I watched as my family became more and more worried. There were late night phone calls and trips to the hospital. I could feel the stress in the house.
One evening as my father was putting me to sleep, I decided to ask about Savta. “What is making Savta so sick? When will she leave the hospital?”
Then I asked the question I had been wondering about all along.
“Is it possible Savta won’t make it through this illness?”
The look on my dad’s face told me all I needed to know. I fell asleep, sad and confused.
When I went to school the next day, I couldn’t wait to start praying.
I reached the optional prayer of healing, closed my eyes as tight as I possibly could, stood before G-d and begged Him to save my grandmother’s life.
It was the first time I ever cried during a prayer; the first time I truly had something to ask for. By the time I finished, my siddur was soaked in tears.
Thank G-d, my grandmother survived two complicated fights with the disease. She is back to her wonderful and active lifestyle. It has been seven years since I said that one prayer of healing, but the feeling of connection with G-d, prayer and my family has never left me.
Do I believe that prayer guarantees health? Not at all. But it isn’t just a hope either.
In my opinion, G-d is not a distant, divine being who has no interest in His world and His children. I feel Him with me through every tear and smile. I know that my connection to Him means something. And I know that every time I open my siddur and talk to G-d, He is truly listening.
I am thankful every day that I am lucky enough to have the gift of prayer to get myself, my family and my nation through the most difficult times.
Rabbi Adam Morris, Temple Micah
The prayer for healing gets ‘em every time. People may not have too much experience with prayer in general, but when it comes time for the healing prayer — whether in a hospital room or the sanctuary — illness, frailty and mortality get people praying.
Why do these moments feel ripe for prayer? And why don’t we pray more outside of these moments?
I think prayer gets a bad rap. Many people assume that prayer is about asking some deity for something they want or need. Right there, that assumption creates a very narrow theological threshold.
For some, that kind of mysterious, cosmic give-and-take works great. I believe most people fit through that threshold. But many won’t even try, limiting prayer to the temple or other institutional religious settings and/or practices.
Many people want and respond to the formal, organized structure provided by the ebb and flow of communal prayer directed toward a deity.
They find comfort and meaning in reciting words, and their accompanying sentiments, with other people.
Others respond to something completely different. The meaning they experience in prayer derives from whatever prayerful exercise challenges, grounds or inspires them.
They can feel this during an exercise not traditionally associated with prayer, and may categorize it as prayer upon reflection, once the experience ends.
I inhabit both these groups — sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes exclusively. Divinity is always there, no matter how unaware we are of Its presence.
When I pray, I seek to open myself to the awareness and flow of that divinity, which supports, pushes, prods and embraces me, and those around me.
Whether I find myself in a joyous, mundane or tragic moment, it is not a question of asking “G-d” for something.
It’s about summoning us to open our minds, hearts and spirits to that divine presence.
Arel Mishory, Zera Abraham
Traditionally, the Mi Shebeirach prayer for healing is recited as a public prayer in the synagogue after the Torah reading. A person who receives an aliyah gives names to the gabbai for a Mi Shebeirach.
At a different point, another Mi Shebeirach is said for the health and healing of the sick. There will either be a list of names in the gabbai’s possession, or people will recite the names on their own.
Because praying for health and healing is not limited to public prayer times, I recite the Refa’ainu, one of the 18 blessings in the Shemoneh Esrei.
I have found that thinking daily of someone whose name I say — asking for a complete healing of this person — creates a certain relationship and closeness to them.
It is a tool that can increase compassionate awareness of a fellow Jew and enhance feelings of love between us.
I do not always know who that person is, nor do I always have a close relationship with each name on my list.
Along with thinking of and praying for the sick in my daily prayers, I will ask G-d to heal people in my own words throughout the day.
Praying for someone or even for oneself can happen at any time. It does not have to occur in a formal place or a designated time of prayer. And what better way to occupy your mind than having good thoughts of other people and praying for their well being?
Sometimes all I is say, “Hashem, please help (so-and-so)” — or just “Help.”
An important way to ask for healing of people who are ill or in crisis is to turn to the Psalms, which Jews have relied on for centuries to offer comfort. I recently bought a new book of Tehillim translated by Yitzchok Leib Bell, and it has transformed how I say the Psalms.
The translations are so lyrical that I am often moved to say them out loud or even sing them, as they were meant to be. I belong to two Tehillim groups: one in Denver; and another comprised of 300 women around the world. We say the same chapter of Tehillim every day on our own. When we finish the book, we start over.
I am now on my fourth round.
Marilyn Jordan, Temple Sinai
Do I believe in the prayer for healing? My answer is an immediate yes. What does it mean to me? For this, I look in two directions that often overlap: community prayer and personal prayer.
Community prayer brings me a sense of belonging; being part of a group with whom I connect in belief and heritage.
I look forward to Shabbat services. It’s a space for me to regroup and replenish, process the week and breathe in shalom in a safe, comforting environment.
Personal prayer can assume different forms. I thank G-d for my numerous blessings in personal prayers.
Most of them consist of a simple “thank you, G-d” for my family, my health, the mountains, an experience, this moment — so many things. At other times I ask G-d for continued strength, guidance, courage and inner peace to face new and ongoing challenges and stresses.
My family has faced multiple health challenges, which have molded my prayer processes. The pivotal one was my son’s brain tumor diagnosis at age eight, with 28 subsequent years (and counting) of treatments and caregiving.
He has multiple physical, cognitive and emotional disabilities, as well as an acquired neurobehavioral brain injury.
Caring for my son and trying to keep the lives of my three daughters as “normal” as possible have resulted in many conversations with G-d.
My youngest daughter was diagnosed with lupus at age 18, and as the disease progressed she suffered strokes and blood clots in her brain at age 21 and still has periodic flare ups.
Obviously the Mi Shebeirach speaks to me strongly and is a go-to prayer for me. I pray for a refuah shlema for my children, myself and the emotional and physical toll it has taken on us all.
For 15 combined years I was the primary caregiver for my husband, mother and father — which I felt was an honor and a privilege. Yet I was physically and emotionally drained and depressed. Sometimes I wondered how I could handle another day. But I also dreaded losing them. I would drop into bed late at night, exhausted, worried and often in tears.
I leaned on G-d. Through my prayers, my conversations with G-d and my faith, I chose to awaken in the mornings with renewed energy, ready to take on whatever lay ahead.
After my father died, my “deliberate gratitude” escalated in frequency and intensity. It helped me deal with the grief of those losses and redefine my new role.
While I’m still a full-time caregiver and advocate, I now allow myself to carve out time for myself.
By making a concerted effort throughout the day to recognize and be grateful for my blessings, I am now at my spiritual and emotional best. This is what the prayer for healing looks like and how it works for me. I am blessed.
Susan Kaplan, B’nai Havurah
I sat near my husband Richard Gould’s plain pine coffin, unable to catch my breath, let alone take in the magnitude of losing my bashert, my soul mate. How can anyone comprehend what healing means when faced with a profound change — the death of a loved one, physical decline and illness, mental health disorders or spiritual challenges.
Although a cloud of tears blurred my vision, I noticed a bouquet of flowers. Looking closer, I saw it was made of kale leaves, carefully crafted into shapes of flowers.
This stunning, beautiful array of green and purple kale made such a difference in that moment. It embodied our story of gardening together: talking, weeding, watching sunsets and munching on our harvest together.
There were so many moments of spiritual presence that day. My heart broke open with these seemingly small yet enormous gestures of love and compassion. It was almost indescribable.
The mundane tasks of death, like picking out the coffin, were paired with the spiritual presence I felt holding my sobbing daughter and son who just lost their precious father.
How does one hold on to seemingly opposite experiences in order to heal, repair and restore one’s body and spirit — a sense of brokenness alongside sacred moments of grace, love, synchronicity and spirituality?
Can healing change when I change the conversation? What if I am not broken? If brokenness is part of my wholeness, how do I open myself to receive the divine sparks of light that are within and around me?
Mi Shebeirach became of one of those divine sparks of light for me. Prayer is a conversation with the Divine, both personal and communal.
When I felt stuck, I heard different aspects of this blessing. I was repeatedly inspired to let go of specific ideas of what healing was supposed to be and allow things to enfold naturally.
For me, this prayer is a constant invitation to notice, embrace, stay awake and continually participate in my own healing process. I couldn’t deny the pain. It was too persistent. But I kept returning to the power of co-creation in healing.
As I moved forward, I was also able to expand my healing by including those from the past, including our ancestors and all those who I had loved in my own life but were no longer here. “What would Sarah, our matriarch, help me laugh about today? What advice would my Uncle Harry share with me?”
I typically preferred to give rather than ask for help. Mi Shebeirach nudged me into places of courage. It taught me new aspects of healing, like the audacity to stick with a long, difficult process; or the realization that I’m not alone when I hear my name said aloud in temple.
Now when I say this prayer on Shabbat I can feel its visceral power and efficacy. Spoken in community, it is a larger conversation between the Divine and myself, the people around me, and those in need of healing. What a beautiful opportunity to have a heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul conversation of light.
Andrea Jacobs may be reached at andrea@ijn.com.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News