The benefits of personal prayer

Re: Why Jews pray, Opinion March 14

Why Jews pray, Opinion March 14

This inspirational opinion piece can actually be applied more generally to most religions.

It is well known that organized religions have some form of congregational prayer that is conducted for a common purpose such as expressing gratitude to the higher power for blessings received or to invoke higher intervention to alleviate a drought or calamity, for instance.

However, prayer on a personal or individual level is also known to be highly beneficial, such as by a student studying for an important test or exam.

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For instance, in Islam, the Holy Qur’an includes decree from the Almighty to the effect “tell My servants, if they invoke Me, I hear them and answer them.” At this level, benefits of personal prayer can be both therapeutic and spiritual. So if the individual has conviction in the higher power, he can stand to benefit both ways.

However, even if he does not, he still stands to benefit by virtue of the old adage that a problem shared is a problem halved, and therefore, the mere verbalization of a problem to another entity can in itself result in self-fulfillment of the desired result or pose a solution. This is known to be very powerful.

Mohamedarif M. Jagani, Markham

Dow Marmor suggests that the Jewish mode of prayer, selfless and not narcissistic, prayer focused on community and justice, might have contributed to some bending of border rules in allowing his granddaughter to visit Israel though her passport was not up-to-date.

Perhaps prayer can help other deserving people gain entry into Israel, like Jewish human rights defenders who were previously denied entry: Noam Chomsky, historian Norman Finkelstein, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Richard Falk.

And certainly people can adopt these values of community and justice and pray for the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians who have been denied entry to their birthplace.

Judith Deutsch, Toronto