On Friday we asked them to pray
Last Updated on Tuesday, 11 January 2011 08:48 Written by bryfy Tuesday, 11 January 2011 08:48
As someone who struggles with concepts of God (an atheist one might say) there is a certain chutzpah of me writing this post. There is also a sense of timing that I am uncomfortable with. Normally the questions that I am posing should wait, at least until after the shloshim (30 day memorial period after someone dies), but I also feel that they require immediate attention, because I imagine that these are the questions that many of you might be asking, or that many of you might be asked when you see your students next.
I am about to ask questions of all of you – ones that as a Jewish educator I struggle to find answers to….
On Friday we asked all of our students, our families, our congregations to say a mishebeyrach for Debbie Friedman z”l. By Sunday those same gatherings that were convened to come to pray for health were turned into memorial services.
Now, what do we tell our students? What power does the mishebeyrach prayer hold if it cannot even help the one who composed its melody? How will they approach this prayer, or any other prayer for that matter, with the same intentionality as before? What do we do for those who feel that this prayer has let them down once when they may have felt that they needed it most?
These questions are not new ones. And they are ones that Jewish educators, rabbis and parents have dealt with for centuries. But now we have the worldwide web to help us out – and to help me out. What will you tell your students the next time you see them?
If you have the strength, please share with me and with others how you might begin to address these questions….
This week I have also thought a lot about the many song leaders that are in my life today – those who are both colleagues and friends. Those who I have shared my cynicism with and those who I have secretly admired and even envied their power as Jewish educators. I know that this week they, like many of us, will all have heavy hearts. But they are also shared with an additional burden. This week their obligation to share Jewish music and Jewish education has become all the more important. Again I am envious of their gifts and in awe of their talents. May you have the strength to continue Debbie’s legacy.
I also need to mention the community where I first heard Debbie Friedman perform. CAJE was my first introduction to the world of American Jewish community in its grandest sense. It was there that I first really experienced pluralism and community of the size that CAJE conferences offered. It was there that I was fortunate enough to work with great staff (Dan, Shellie, Shira, Dan, Joe…) and be mentored by some of the gdolim in Jewish education. The kids and staff of the CAJE Teen Kallah, you carry forward the songs of the CAJE choir and the CAJE community. Whatever that community was and whatever it might emerge as – you were all part of that experience – who first introduced the power of Debbie and the power of Jewish music and ritual to me.
This week has been one of personal and communal reflection. As I sat watching the live funeral service online (alone with 7,000+ others), first in an office, and then from my colleagues cell phone as we sat in a train station, I felt a sense of community that would not have been imaginable just a few years ago. Even in her passing Debbie Friedman z”l has managed to bring together the diverse Jewish community like none other that I have ever witnessed.
Wow, David. Gutsy. Bold. And, I think, appropriate, despite your internal conflicts about timing. I also think you answer your own question-the power of, in this case, the mi shebeyrakh prayer was not in its ability or inability to bring healing to any one individual, but in its power to bring so many thousands of people together in common cause and concern. G”d, whatever our understanding of G”d is (and like you, I struggle) is found in the relationship-which, in this case, is the relationship between all those who were praying as well as the relationship between all those praying and the person they were praying for. Trite and Buberian, perhaps, but one way of looking at it. In a way, it is similar to examples of people showing strength during adversity, how people are spurred to action in tragic circumstances. A good rabbi might easily spin a nice midrash about how Debbie was taken away from us just to allow the rest of us the come together in support of each other, and with greater dedication to carry on her work. I can;t say I find any of these answers satisfactory, but at least they are a place to start.
David,
I have struggled with this ever since realizing I would have to answer these questions upon returning to work tomorrow at school.
I think the simplest way to answer is that sometimes the healing, is not that the disease is cured, but rather that by no longer suffering the person is healed.
Remember its not just healing of the body, but also of the spirit, and I would like to think that we do not know enough to say that the prayer “failed”
David – excellent questions, which have been on my mind as well. It made me go back to the English of the prayer (something Debbie was great at doing — helping people who don’t know Hebrew well to recognize what they were singing). From MyJewishLearning:
May the One who blessed our ancestors — Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah — bless and heal the one who is ill:
________________ son/daughter of ________________ . May the Holy Blessed One overflow with compassion upon him/her, to restore him/her, to heal him/her, to strengthen him/her, to enliven him/her. The One will send him/her, speedily, a complete healing — healing of the soul and healing of the body — along with all the ill, among the people of Israel and all humankind, soon, speedily, without delay, and let us all say: Amen!
There’s a lot here. One could say that G-d did overflow with compassion, strengthened, perhaps healed her spirit, if not her body. Who are we to know. But the last few days have been incredibly powerful, and one thing is for sure — her spirit will ALWAYS be in this prayer, so vividly, for me. And Shabbat Shira will always have her imprint.
I look forward to hearing what others have to say. These are important questions — as individuals, as Jews, as teachers. Thanks for raising them.
On Friday, I was the substitute teacher for 5th grade Judaica at Milwaukee Jewish Day School, and the conversation/lesson was about prayer. I began by teaching them one thing I had learned from Torah Yoga, about the power of the concept of Chevruta, and then we sang a song I had written inspired by the phrase, “Ani T’filati L’Cha” — how we have to bring our whole selves to prayer (or to the yoga mat) every day.
And we continued — why do people pray? I had them put their heads down and each think of an answer, and they participated one by one as I touched them. Lots of reasons were offered, all of them perfectly perfect. And then someone said, “We pray for G!D to heal someone” and I knew even then, that it could be a set-up for disappointment. What if they don’t get better? Then what?
I told them Debbie was sick, and that people all over the world were singing the Mi Sheberach for healing to her…and we raised our voices in song. And then, the most marvelous feeling of connection happened. Just as drops disappear in an ocean, and dots converge to make a line, and notes become music, our prayers became part of a wondrous weave of love and emotion that stretched to the high heavens.
As a bereaved mother who still believes in G!D and in prayer, I will say, “The healing is in the being part of something bigger, in knowing that we matter, in having people to sing in harmony with us as we sing out to G!D.” I think it matters that we reach out our voices and our selves to be in real relationship with our students and our souls and direct our energies toward the good and holy (that which we call G!D). I’m going to keep being on the team, even if we don’t win every game or complete every pass. How about you?
Some thoughts:
1. Like previous commenters have indicated, certainly the Jewish community got a big helping of healing this week. I have never felt so close to so many people who were so far away. Thursday night I’m attending a Night of Music dedicated to Debbie, which I’m sure will be as powerful an actual experience as the virtual one was today.
2. Sometimes we just don’t know what healing looks like. The body – the stuff that gets sick – is just a vessel for the soul. Sometimes the soul gets the healing and we can’t see it. Or maybe the soul didn’t need it at all…
First, a blunt statement, but one that needs to be said: if the purpose of the mi sheberach prayer is to prevent a person from dying, then it is, always, necessarily, a failure. We all will die sometime, regardless of how many prayers are said. Preferably that moment will come after a long and wonderful life. But not always.
If the purpose of the prayer is to convince God to intervene and create healing, well, that won’t necessarily work either. It’s not that prayer has no meaning — to the contrary — or that God does not care. Rather, the universe seems to be much more complex than that, so that no straight one-for-one can be discerned. Personally, I think that chaos is built into the very foundations of this world, so that certain events are wholly unpredictable. God is not (so far as I believe) controlling every atom in the universe; there are laws set up, but those laws allow for all sorts of interesting and creative variations. The problem, of course, being that some of these variations (such as illness) are much less welcome than others.
So what, then, is the purpose of this prayer? At its core, it is an act of focusing energy on the desire for wellness and healing. What kind of energy? It’s that weird electric current that can pass through a crowd. It’s that spiritual/emotional energy you feel at intimate events like weddings and baby namings, the one that moves you to tears. It’s that transcendent sense that you might feel at a concert. Or in prayer. Why it’s there, I do not know, but I have experienced it reliably in prayer enough times to know that it is tangible and quite real.
Can that energy heal someone? No, not reliably. But it does somehow seem to help in some fundamental way. And it feels like its origin is somehow divine.
It’s not a scientific answer, but it is the best I can offer.
All the best to you.
i deeply appreciate all of your responses, and for me it’s about trusting HaShem. When we pray, we are placing our trust in the infinite Source of All. There is so much we do no know, do not understand, and never will in this earthly realm. I believe that when we pray for healing, it needs to be an open ended prayer that is not focused on the outcome we so desperately want in our hearts. This is where the trust comes in – we pray for whatever needs to happen for that soul to take place. So whether they remain with us in the physical world or not – we trust that our prayers are answered.
In my own personal relationship with HaShem it is when I am most able to let go of my desired outcome that I feel the deepest trust and giving up to HaShem. I can pour my heart out…and then let go. I have not experienced this, Baruch HaShem, around the death of a loved one, but I have been in very intense situations that have demanded of me more than I knew I could ever be – and that moment of letting go and trusting was amazing. Would I still feel this way if things never worked out according to my heart’s desire? Maybe not. But I have seen the Universe conspire to fulfill my heart’s desire and I believe it was totally because of the letting go and trusting in HaShem.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, David. As you know, I’m Jewish and an educator but not a Jewish educator. For me, it’s the assumptions underlying the questions that are problematic. The frame of your questions presupposes a G-d that acts—as in G-d hears or G-d answers or G-d heals. The personification of G-d—reinforced by liturgy, tradition and interpretation—creates an expectation that G-d will respond to our petition in a human way and that the response will make sense to us. As Rabbi Tuling points out above, this cause and effect reasoning is doomed at the outset. Our struggle becomes a Sisyphean attempt to measure an ethereal G-d using a human yardstick. When I stopped seeing G-d as a biblical genie that had the power to grant wishes, my relationship with G-d shifted and mindfulness about god-ness took over.
Your question about prayer is compelling as well because it goes to the deeper issue of the meaning of ritual. Why do we do any of the things we do? Why, as you intimate, should we pray at all? You wonder about approaching prayer with the same intentionality as before. Maybe we should use this moment to approach the notion of prayer with an intentionality that focuses on making all prayer more meaningful. Finding personal connection—beyond text, history and community—in ritual (including prayer) could be the next big Jewish idea!
I have an ongoing debate with a sociologist friend who claims transformation comes about through behavioral change. She would contend that if you continue to pray, eventually prayer will become meaningful. I argue that change is internal first and that external evidence follows. Judaism, for the most part, agrees with my friend. Daniel Gordis (and others) point out our ancestors declared at Mount Sinai, “We will do and we will hear.” Act. Then understand. Pray and then knowing will come. With apologies [particularly to my Reform friends], I disagree. This thread is a whole other discussion but it must be pointed out that shortly after their affirmation at Mount Sinai, the Israelites began frolicking with a golden calf. Perhaps this was the authors’ way of alluding to the necessity of pre-paving the road to understanding ritual prior to taking action.
Teaching a personal connection to ritual prior to teaching the activity could untangle some of the problems you mention including [perceived] unanswered prayers. Personal meaningful engagement can be very Jewish.
I have been pondering this thread for a while tonight. I’ve focusing on Debbie’s comment, “Sometimes we don’t know what healing looks like”. I think the act of prayer is at its core, a focusing exercise. We turn our attention, our intention toward Gd or whatever we perceive of as a Source. Answering the prayer isn’t like checking off a list, or putting in a request. I don’t think Gd acts in our world that way. I think our prayers of healing for Debbie this week were to give her and her family strength in the knowledge that they weren’t alone, which is what gives all of us strength. Bad stuff is going to happen, people die too young, people get horrible diseases, and people are in pain. Prayer doesn’t make that stop, it gives us , the Pray-ers, what we need to get through the bad stuff. Like Marge said, knowing that you matter is crucial, and when a whole community gathers together to offer prayers and blessings, it tells you that you DO matter. We can be grateful for the people in our lives who make us grapple with questions like these, and as for our students, well, they need to grapple too. No matter how young they are, they know a hug makes them feel better. Is prayer a hug for our souls?
Thank you to everyone who posted such thoughtful and inspiring responses – both on this blog and in personal communications. it is interesting for me to note that this blog entry attracted 200% more traffic than any other entry I have posted, more comments than I have been able to respond to, and as much twitter action as anything else I have written. The power of Debbie z”l truly lives on.
David, this is a great post and such a compelling and important question. Thank you for raising it.