We prayed together, we cried, and we begged the Almighty with thousands of Tehilim. We prayed with our words, with our hearts and with our tears. We held our hope that God will listen and change the decree. And yet, our community experienced a profound and heartbreaking loss in the passing of Dorina Kalaty, Zikhrona Librakha, who was a shining light for so many of us.
After losing someone we loved very much we realize that there is so much we don’t understand. One of our questions has to do with prayers and how they affect real life.
Sometimes, it seems as though our prayers are not reaching Bore Olam. How are we supposed to comprehend this? When we care for someone and pray for them – were our prayers of any use?
I remember a few years ago there was a Jewish old man agonizing and in pain with no medical hope for his recovery. There was a tortured and painful debate among rabbis: should we stop praying for him? Why praying for Refua Shelema, a full recovery for someone that was inevitably dying? Do we pray for miracles?
I searched for wisdom and found guidance in Mr. Nassim Bassalian. He taught me a simple but very powerful lesson about prayer. In Hebrew the word refua that we usually translate as “health” has a wider meaning. Refua also means “alleviation”, “relief”, or “softening”. When we pray for refua shelema we are asking HaShem to have mercy for the person we are praying for: if possible, “Hashem, grant her a full and speedy recovery”. But if HaShem in His infinite wisdom decides that this is not possible, then: “Hashem, please, grant alleviation from her pain, and soften her suffering”. This is also what we ask HaShem in our daily silent prayer (‘amida).“Grant us healing and relief for all our illnesses, all our pains and all our wounds”.
We should never ever give up asking God even for a miracle. But we should also never believe that our prayers did not work —or that they were, God forbid, useless, if the miracle we prayed for did not happen. We should always believe that our prayers have helped the person we prayed for. Alleviating her pain, or in other ways that we can’t possibly fathom… Our loved ones might have been granted more time with us because of our prayers. Very often I hear doctors saying that the patient has just hours to live, and then they live for another week. It could very well be the result of our prayers that HaShem grants “smaller” but extremely meaningful miracles, like precious days or hours or even extra minutes of life, or consciousness.
Lastly, I believe that Hashem takes all our prayers and channels them for those we care about. Perhaps Hashem takes all the prayers we prayed for Dorina’s healing and uses them on behalf of her loved ones. I don’t have a source for this idea. It is an intuition or a wish that all those thousands and thousands of sincere and beautiful prayers for Dorina will be used by HaShem to protect Dorina’s loved ones and give comfort to her wonderful husband, her beautiful children, her amazing parents and all her family that are going through so much pain right now.
R. Yosef Bitton
Dedicated to the memory of Dorina Kalaty z”l.
