Avodah

The second main Jewish resource for one who is ill is avodah: prayer or worship in its broadest context. By avodah, I mean to suggest such activities as individual and communal prayer, mediation, and the spiritual practice of offering berakhot (blessings).

Prayer is an essential spiritual tool to use at a time of illness. It is a natural tool. During a hard time, we need to engage our capacity to hope. Prayer allows us an opportunity to articulate our hopes for healing, for cessation from suffering, for blessing to break through in the mist of pain.

Prayer is also what we do when we do not know what to do, when we are aware that our well- being is not entirely in our control. In this sense, prayer can help us acknowledge that our lives are indeed, b'yado, in God's hands.

Prayer can be a refuge, an inner sanctuary where we find retreat from procedures, treatments and all of the outer world with its many demands. We may find a sense of calm through prayer, a kind of ``time out'' for reflection.

In addition, when we pray in community and use traditional Jewish liturgy, we not only benefit from the company of others, but we find comfort in knowing that the words we speak have been spoken by millions of others who, like us, yearn for healing.

Meditation is a wonderful resource, as well. Chanting a niggun (wordless tune) over and over again can help calm us and connect us to the Source of peace and comfort. Mediating on a particular verse from the Bible or from the siddur can help us embody its meaning in a full way.

Saying blessings can help us lift and savor what is beautiful in the moment. We have blessings for pleasures of taste, sight and smell; blessings of gratitude for being in the presence of someone wise, or someone disfigured. In the latter case, we thank God for creating many kinds of human beings. We have a whole list of blessings for getting up in the mornings, so that our waking routine does not begin with a slam of the alarm clock, but rather with words of gratitude for simple miracles, such as opening our eyes, stretching, standing up.

It is also possible to use old blessing in new contexts, to sanctify the experience of receiving chemotherapy, of meeting with one's doctor, of doing artificial insemination. The spiritual genius about blessings is that they help us reframe our experience in the context of divine reality.