#635: Rabbi, Your Prayer Didn't Work!
A Story for Parashat Vayeḥi, Bereshit/Genesis 48:1
וַיְהִ֗י אַחֲרֵי֙ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה וַיֹּ֣אמֶר לְיוֹסֵ֔ף הִנֵּ֥ה אָבִ֖יךָ חֹלֶ֑ה וַיִּקַּ֞ח אֶת־שְׁנֵ֤י בָנָיו֙ עִמּ֔וֹ אֶת־מְנַשֶּׁ֖ה וְאֶת־אֶפְרָֽיִם׃
Some time afterward, Joseph was told, “Your father is ill.” So he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.
Gimme Some Torah #635
In this week’s Torah portion, Jacob receives word that his father is sick. Here is a story about a Jew who complained that his rabbi’s prayer for a sick relative didn’t work. (The nerve of some people!)
A Hasid once came to the righteous Rabbi Meir Yechiel of Ostrovce with a complaint. He complained that he had asked the rabbi to pray for his sick relative, and yet the rabbi’s prayer did not work; the patient did not get any better and was in need of much mercy.
The righteous man of Ostrovce replied to him: “How am I to blame for the fact that the Holy One has not yet hastened a cure for that patient?
The Hasid cried out sadly to his rabbi: The Sages say in the Talmud (B. Bava Batra 116a): “Whoever has a sick person in his house, let him go to a wise man who will seek mercy him”; and that is what I did: I came to you! You were supposed to arouse the mercy of Heaven on behalf of my sick family member, but your prayer failed!
The Rabbi of Ostrovce shook his head sadly and said: Pay attention, you are misquoting the Talmud. It does not say: “Let him go to a wise man, who will seek mercy for him; rather it says: “Let him go to a wise man and he will ask seek mercy for him.”
It follows from this that the sick person is required to do two things here: first, “he should go to a wise man,” meaning that he should turn to a righteous and pious person, who has the merit to rescind any harsh decree; and second, “the sick person himself should pray to God to seek mercy on his own accord, and not rely solely on the rabbi’s appeal for mercy.”
The interesting thing about this story is that the Talmud there absolutely does say that a rabbi should pray for the sick, and the implication is that the rabbi’s prayer should (or at least might) work! So why did the Rabbi of Ostrovce answer the man the way he did?
He did so, I think, because the man was not thinking properly about prayer. God always answers our prayers—but we have to realize that, often, the answer is no. The fact that a patient we prayed for has gotten sicker or died does not mean the prayer did not “work.”
When we say that a prayer “works” in a Jewish context, we do not necessarily mean that we got what we asked for. It could be, instead, that the prayer brought comfort to someone in emotional distress. It could be that the prayer gave a spark of hope in the midst of hopelessness.
Moreover, the complainer had a weird idea about what it means to be the rabbi of a community. He apparently thought that he could just stop by the rabbi’s house and pick up a prayer for healing just as one might pick up a bag of onions from the supermarket. At least in my personal experience, it doesn’t work like that at all!
Not every prayer, no matter how earnest or beautiful, results in a miracle.
Discussion Questions:
If prayers do not cure sickness, what is the point of them?
Prayers need not ask for anything. What other goals could a prayer have?
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Rabbi Eli Garfinkel is the spiritual leader of Temple Beth El in Somerset, New Jersey. He is the author of The JPS Jewish Heritage Torah Commentary.