How Praying Together Can Offer Hope—Even When Prayers Aren’t Answered

Every night, I took part in a prayer group to help a sick child and her family. But I’m the one who ended up transformed.

By Rebecca Wolf for Tablet Magazine

When my daughter’s classmate Hannah was diagnosed with cancer and started chemotherapy, all the parents of fifth-graders in our Jewish day school banded together to try to help her family. One mother offered to organize a carpool to take Hannah’s siblings to their after-school activities if her parents were still busy at the hospital; another said she’d arrange delivery of home-cooked dinners; someone else would pick up basic necessities like toilet paper and milk.

Hannah’s family politely refused. “What would help the most,” they said, “is for you to pray.” Hannah’s aunt organized a nightly conference call where she would lead a recitation of psalms for as long as Hannah needed them.

Although I have been a religious person all my life, their request made me nervous. What seemed daunting wasn’t the prospect of extracting myself from my children’s homework and bedtime routines for 15 minutes each night, but rather that someone thought my prayers could make a difference. It was so much easier for me to commit to cooking lasagna than to praying with fervor.

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My complicated feelings about prayer began when I was 12. I came home from school one September day to find the phone ringing incessantly. My mother was on the line, calling to say that her father—my Zayde—had suffered a massive heart attack. He was in the ICU and things looked bad. “What should I do?” I asked my mother. “Just pray!” she shouted, and slammed down the phone. I locked myself in my room. Despite being enrolled in religious day school, I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Please God,” I whispered, “Don’t let Zayde die.” An hour later my mother called back to say he was dead. For years I felt plagued by guilt that if I had just prayed a bit harder, things might have been different.

As an adult, I now recognize that sometimes our prayers are answered and sometimes they are not, regardless of how intensely we pray. I believe in God and pray every morning, mostly to acknowledge there is a higher power above me. Most of the time, though, I mumble the words without much regard for their meaning. I tend to focus harder on my prayers when something is wrong than when everything is going well, even though I’m unsure my piety (or lack thereof) actually affects the outcome. In Hannah’s situation, however, what I felt about prayer wasn’t really the point; if her family believed that it could save her, who was I to argue?

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