Refah Na Lanu … A Healing Service

This past month we began to include, along with our traditional services, a Jewish Healing Service on a Sunday evening. If this appears to be something that the congregation and community latch on to, we will begin to do them on a regular basis.

“As creators of services and liturgies of healing, we dare to enter the wilderness. Indeed, not one wilderness, but two. The one is the communal wilderness of self-authenticated ritual, where we toil and forage and cobble together words and songs and spaces that attempt to reach powerfully toward the Eternal and each other. The other is the private wilderness of those who come to us for hope and companionship and comfort. We are humbled by the expectations and doors we may open in the context of these services.”

The function of a service of healing is to invite Jews into an environment in which each person can, through prayer, invite God to be in relationship to his or her suffering. While each person comes to the service as an individual, the group also gathers as a collective. There may be an element of healing simply in the gathering itself, as one senses that one is not alone, as one feels oneself to be part of a community of sufferers, as with reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Similarly, the service of healing acknowledges that, among Jews, there are those who are suffering, those who are in pain from life’s assaults. Any human community has its share of physical and spiritual suffering; any authentic Jewish community should find ways to recognize that pain in a Jewish context.

The service of healing is a contemporary creation, born of necessity. It is a cry for community in a society which prizes individualism; it is a coming together of those who feel broken and vulnerable. Though the service of healing is a new creation, when done on its own, we are integrating our service of healing within a traditional Mincha and Maariv service. It borrows from different parts of the traditional liturgy and Jewish texts and rearranges them. It adds new pieces which invite the voices of individuality rather than the collective alone. It asks that we bring our particular truths to the communal expression of prayer.

A Service of Healing provides a structured time and place of prayer, reflection, meditation and communal connection for those who are coping with illness (and other traumas such as accident and assault), with grief and with loss. This mix of traditional and non-traditional liturgy and activity connects the participant to historic Jewish tradition while integrating modern modes of expression, attention and communication. Through such service, one may derive spiritual strength not only from the traditional liturgy, but also from quiet reflection and meditation and from personal sharing and listening.