Healing

Searching for meaning or solace in a time of sickness or pain? Here we offer Jewish insights and rituals, both traditional and contemporary, for those in need of healing.

To access the CLAL Healing Archive, click here.

Before Treating a Patient

You have created me in Your image and blessed me with the capacity and the opportunity to be a healer. Like you, I do not heal alone. You have embued me with a desire to learn and have blessed me with teachers whose wisdom I have acquired. You have inspired those who came before me to create miraculous healing tools that I now can use for good. You surround me with all those who support the healing work to which I dedicate my life, preparing before me and continuing after my part of the healing work is done.

Help me to let my patients become covenental partners in my work and open my eyes to see each patient I meet as a whole human being.

Help me to extend the dignity and quality of my patients’ lives and honor their uniqueness and infinite value.

Meditation

Help me to bring healing to my patients even as I accept, with humility, the finite quality of life. Let me be altogether present to my patients.

Ritual

(For all those who are involved in healing.)

Pause before encountering a patient.

Acknowledge how you are joined in your healing work by the divine presence, the Shekhinah, resting at the head of the bed.

Blessing

(To be said before treating a patient or initiating any medical procedure)

Refaeinu Adonai v’neirafeh hoshi’einu v’nivashe’ah ki t’hilateinu atah v’he’eleh refuah shleimah l’khol makhoteinu ki el melekh rofeh v’ne’eman v’rachaman atah. Barukh atah Adonai rofeh cholim.

Heal us, Source of Healing, and we shall be healed. Save us and we shall be saved, for You are our song. Bring to us a healing of mind, heart and body from all that hurts us, for You are a true and compassionate Healer. Blessed are You who sends Raphael, the messenger of healing, to guide my hand and my mind to care for Your creations.

(Amidah prayer)

Teaching

"Oh God on high, as I begin this holy work of healing the human beings you have created, I place myself before you. Give me courage, energy and passion so I may do my work in faith. Let my desire for a good reputation not blind me from seeing your presence. Allow me to encounter each patient who comes to me as an Image of God, without differentiating between rich and the poor, ally or enemy, good or evil. When I see human beings in pain, only show me their humanity. If physicians wiser than I wish to teach me, let me learn from them, for the Torah of medicine has no end. Dear merciful God, give me the strength, courage and spirit, so that I may watch over life and healing. "

(adapted from the "Prayer for the Doctor" attributed to Maimonides)

Baruch atah Adonai, rofeh cholim.

Blessed are you, Source of Healing.

(CLAL Faculty)