Are you looking for a minyan to say kaddish? A streaming Shabbat service to join from your home or cell phone? Prayers and blessings you can recite on your own?
A Prayer for the Health and Healing of Healers
May the One who blessed our ancestors
Bless all those who put themselves at risk to care for the sick
Physicians and nurses and orderlies
Technicians and home health aides
EMTs and pharmacists
And bless especially / an individual or other categories of health workers/
Who navigate the unfolding dangers of the world each day,
To tend to those they have sworn to help.
Bless them in their coming home and bless them in their going out.
Ease their fear. Sustain them.
Source of all breath, healer of all beings,
Protect them and restore their hope.
Strengthen them, that they may bring strength;
Keep them in health, that they may bring healing.
Help them know again a time when they can breathe without fear.
Bless the sacred work of their hands.
May this plague pass from among us, speedily and in our days.
— Rabbi Ayelet S. Cohen, March 2020
Pandemic
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
––Lynn Ungar, 3/11/20
Bay Area synagogues offering live-streamed services and Torah study opportunities:
Congregation Sherith Israel (Reform)
Congregation Emanu-El (Reform)
Congregation Beth Sholom (Conservative)
Chabad of Petaluma (Orthodox) First Seder warmup
Congregation Sha’ar Zahav (Reform) Second Night Seder
Pandemic-related liturgical resources:
From the Central Convention of American Rabbis
Prayer for the Ill and the Caregivers
Check back here for updated information, and feel free to Contact us with additional suggestions
