The car rolled over and over and in it the family and "my bat mitzvah girl" were slammed about. They all were miraculously alive when the vehicle came to a halt, two girls would require surgery and "my" recent bat mitzvah girl would be in a deep, unresponsive coma. Watching the parents, who deserved trauma care themselves, going from room to room of their wounded children, even these five years later, brings a rush of tears to my eyes.
Looking back, I remember my love for that congregation I served for almost ten years, and for this particular family. The anxiety and hopelessness grew huge in me, as to my eye, the hospital staff, hour by hour, appeared to be giving up on her. It was a series of days I shall also always remember, because it was when my intellectual and cultural understanding of Judaism was no longer enough. It was the first time I truly prayed, many years after graduating as a "trained rabbi."
The nurses said it was good to massage her twitching legs. I tried to sense a presence in her, to feel her consciousness. My soul kept trying to find hers, and I couldn't even feel my own body at all after awhile.
Gradually, soft healing-sounding songs from the psalms came through me, filling the lengthening hours, hopefully offering a buffer to the beeping of every piece of equipment for her. Then, I found myself just talking to her, as though she could hear, about this and that. I taught the parents the prayer Moses said for his sister Miriam, when she fell ill, simply:
Ana Please
El God
Na Please
R’fa heal
na la her.
Despairing inside, professional on the outside, I couldn't leave. Stayed on and an adventure story began to emerge in the place of my songs, perhaps a combination of my exhaustion, her dreams and my projections. A story came through me to here where a gorgeous teenage boy snatched her up to travel the medieval world together by ship to reach Jerusalem. Their mission was to sketch a picture of the Wailing Wall at the request of the mythical boy’s grandfather's. The hospital monitor caught my eye during the telling, a variation in blood pressure? Or was that line the heart rate? Did that mean something? The staff said, "No, it just happens." Finally went home in exhaustion.
Returned the next night and continued the story, slipping in the image of a kiss between her and the young man . . . her heart beat began to race and her blood pressure did increase . . . still, the doctors were solemn and sad, their faces showing how foolishly they thought my efforts, the nurses kind but talking toward her less and less. I understood them to be shutting down, protecting themselves.
Meanwhile, I seem to recall that her sisters each had a major surgery with a good prognosis, their recovery expected. Any sick child is a spiritual challenge to loving parents, but to have three all at once!
I hoped that if the parents knew I'd napped earlier in the day that they would succumb to going home for a solid, comfortable sleep. Somehow they couldn't leave her to the loving attendance of family or friends or the numerous willing congregants. It seemed it would take the improbable arrival of angels. I was so glad they allowed me ultimately to stay with her one night while they did go get some rest.
2 a.m. I took advantage of a code taking place for another ICU patient, to cover the daughter in a coma with my rainbow tallit (prayer shawl.) I felt the pulse of her life force and resting lightly over her with my full body, my heart broke open, and out through it my soul flew up in desperation toward an untapped Source, soundless petitions poured out pleas for her healing . . . time lost meaning and then I felt a probing in my awareness, nothing physical. I lifted my head in a daze, pulled back the tallit . . . surprised that I'd had the chutzpah to cover her face . . .
She was looking right at me, a large tear slipping down her face. Her broken jaw had been wired shut so she couldn't talk, she had a tracheotomy tube in . . . oxygen . . . We communicated with our eyes and our tears, then I remembered I could talk and very quickly said: "Don’t try to talk, you had an accident, your jaws are wired shut, you are healing. We'll be a team for recovery, ok?" She squeezed my hand and then fell back into the jerking coma. I felt warring hope and despair. I called a nurse who cheered me when she whooped in joy and decided to wake a doctor with the news. We looked at her again, the coma had shifted to visibly deep sleep. "Go home now, Rabbi," she said, "by now that room must be draped in angels."
The end of that first week our congregation held a healing service for her, we had never before held one. She had been in and out of coma quite a bit by then. The service felt so different from any other. Usually I led services, this time the service led us. I closed my eyes and let the traditional chain of melodies, prayer and movement come....the deep structure of the service imprinted by training supported us in our hope, terror, grief, fear........we brought out the Torah and held it horizontally like a body, selecting the one dressed in the white cover for the High Holy Days.......the peers of the parents and the three girls pressed in closely, tears flowed freely as we chanted Moses’ prayer together, ana el na rfa na la.
With the family's permission, I described to the community the week of terror and hope that had just transpired. We became a radiant mass, like radio_free New Jersey, broadcasting through the cosmos our loving concern, healing hopes and prayers. As my gaze touched them others whispered the names of those in their intimate worlds who need healing. The river of caring energy was passionately palpable.......we chanted "ana El na" over and over and then sang Rabbi Shohama Wiener’s prayer for healing for ourselves as well as for the family, asking "may the waters of healing flow through our souls... our minds... our hearts... our forms." We were all of us huddled around the Torah and stayed there in silent prayer long after setting it back in the ark.....our closing Aleynu prayer held such richness and connection.
I had promised a talking circle after services for people to share their thoughts and feelings. We didn’t need that, the moment was too holy to talk about then. Congregants said they just wanted to take the experience of the service home inside of them, to savor and consider the healing they'd sent and received. I, too, was relieved, enlivened, healed.
Today the "bat mitzvah girl" is a lovely, successful, healthy young woman.
My understanding of Jewish theology does not have any expectation of a precise response to our prayers. The Cosmos has far greater needs to sort out than what’s going on individually with each of us. I don’t take what happens so personally, I do take notice of the research which suggests prayer does affect health. I don’t imagine my prayer healed the young woman above, though it did help me and perhaps created a shift in the field of possibility. I do take notice of Chaos Theory and believe that the way we energetically approach something can encourage a particular outcome. Whether it is our attitude or our physiology, or the inclination of Creation, something changes when we pray.