{ "archive_path": "archive/1789898421.881756", "base_url": "www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze", "basename": "rjladw6tze", "bookmarked_date": "2026-09-20 10:00", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.ynetnews.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze.html" }, "domain": "www.ynetnews.com", "extension": "", "hash": "EPJ96CG2DWYW7EQX6XQF", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.ynetnews.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:18.544594+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789898421.881756", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:17.884783+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:18.914944+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789898421.881756", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:18.552835+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:45.157608+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789898421.881756", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:39.436882+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmp66j4ozt5", "https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:39.427462+00:00", "index_texts": [ "As Yom Kippur approaches, scholars, therapists and Hersh Goldberg-Polin\u2019s mother explore why we pray, why Jewish prayer engages body and community, and why people often turn to a higher power precisely when they feel most helplessThe Days of Repentance, culminating in Yom Kippur, are among the most concentrated and emotionally charged periods of prayer in the Jewish calendar. Even people who rarely enter a synagogue during the rest of the year often set aside everyday distractions to join the collective rhythm and language of Jewish prayer.And it is not only during the High Holy Days. Many people who do not consider themselves religious, observant or even believers find themselves praying in moments of distress and crisis, reaching toward a higher power as if grasping for a psychological lifeline.Gallery(Photo: Alex Gamburg)But prayer, says Dr. Shraga Bick of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem\u2019s Department of Comparative Religion, a scholar of Judaism and Christianity who studies prayer rituals, is not a transaction with God and should not be understood simply as a way of obtaining something from Him.So what is prayer?\n\u201cIt is a ritual act whose purpose is to bring human beings into the service of God, through words but especially through the body, because so much of prayer happens through the body: swaying, movement,\u201d Bick says. \u201cOn Yom Kippur, you cannot write the prayer on a piece of paper and send it to the synagogue. A person has to actually be there for many hours, standing, holding the prayer book, moving, swaying, bowing. Prayer is therefore a distinctly physical event.\u201dThen where do the soul and longing come in?\n\u201cWe often think of prayer as something that emerges spontaneously from the heart, in quiet intimacy. But Jewish prayer takes place through the entire body, while I am surrounded by other people in the synagogue and everyone hears everyone else\u2019s voice.\u201cOf course, alongside collective prayer there is also a model of personal prayer, but that is only one part of the ritual, one element in an entire puzzle.\u201dOne of the figures who came to embody prayer for many Israelis after October 7 was Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was murdered in Hamas captivity.In the months after her son was abducted, Goldberg-Polin became known not only for her public campaign to bring the hostages home, but also for a deeply personal language of faith and prayer that came to resonate collectively.\u201cI grew up in Chicago in a secular family, and yet three times a year my parents would take off work and all of us would go together to synagogue,\u201d she says. \u201cThose were the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The prayers were long and mysterious. We had no idea what the words in the prayer book meant, and we didn\u2019t know the choreography or rules of the ritual: when to sit, when to stand, when to step backward and when to step forward. We were like strangers who had wandered into an intricate dance in an unfamiliar land.\u201cIn retrospect, it seems like a perfect recipe for disaster, like deciding once a year to run a marathon without training or exercising at any other point during the year. If, by some miracle, you make it to the finish line, you\u2019ll be in tremendous pain and will have no desire to challenge yourself again. In my family\u2019s case, that meant an entire year would pass before we entered a synagogue again. Until then, the ritual was over. Goodbye and see you next year.\u201dAt first, Goldberg-Polin says, prayer itself seemed complicated and confusing.\u201cOn the surface, it can feel as though we are drawing up a wish list and submitting it to some idea of God, who is himself elusive and difficult to comprehend. But the word tefillah, prayer, itself hints at what we are hoping to accomplish through this interesting opportunity.\u201dRachel Goldberg-Polin (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg, AP)What do you mean?\n\u201cThe Hebrew verb lehitpalel, to pray, is reflexive. It describes something we are doing to ourselves. The root, p-l-l, also carries meanings connected to judgment and evaluation.\u201cSo instead of seeing prayer as a shopping list directed toward an outside entity, when we pray we are actually undertaking an exercise in introspection and even self-examination. It isn\u2019t easy, and it isn\u2019t supposed to be easy. We ask: What matters to us? What should we focus on? What is our purpose here? What is our meaning?\u201dThat language of purpose and self-examination has become closely associated with the legacy of her son Hersh.Rachel Goldberg-Polin: \u201cInstead of seeing prayer as a shopping list directed toward an outside entity, when we pray we are actually undertaking an exercise in introspection\u201dWhat is prayer for you?\n\u201cDuring this serious and solemn holiday season, I remember a conversation I had with a friend years ago. \u2018The moment I believe there is a God, I\u2019ll start praying and build a relationship with Him,\u2019 she told me.\u201cI understood what she meant, but I thought that in other relationships the formula is reversed. First you meet someone and think, \u2018This person seems special, and perhaps it is worth investing in getting to know them more deeply.\u2019 Then we start thinking about them and acting accordingly: inviting them for coffee, calling to see how they are, asking them to go for a walk, stopping by when they are sick.\u201cSlowly, through effort, we create a connection, and one day we are amazed to discover that a relationship has been born. Jews believe action is one of the building blocks of what will come later. That is true with our families, our friends, our people and our Creator. Relationships deepen through actions and deeds. Sometimes that means beginning without knowing in advance where it will lead.\u201dGoldberg-Polin points to the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who spoke of a \u201cleap of action\u201d rather than simply a \u201cleap of faith.\u201dWhat does that mean?\n\u201cThat a person must go beyond his own needs and do more than he understands, in order to understand more than he does. \u2018I felt my legs were praying,\u2019 Rabbi Heschel said of marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama.\u201cThat is the essence of prayer. Not only to think or believe, but to act.\u201dProf. Elisheva Baumgarten, dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a scholar of medieval religious history, says evidence of prayer and appeals to gods or supernatural powers can be found across cultures going back to prehistoric times.\u201cThe sociological assumption is that people have always prayed and turned toward forces greater than themselves, because there have always been circumstances we did not know how to cope with on our own,\u201d she says.\u201cFrom the beginning of the biblical story, we see human beings speaking to God and making requests, while God positions Himself as the one who responds and makes decisions. There is individual prayer and there is organized prayer, and there are differences between them. When people pray together, there has to be order and a fixed text.\u201dWhich came first?\n\u201cClearly, personal prayer came first. Communities grew out of the personal, and prayers developed within those communities.\u201dBick says spontaneous prayer is almost instinctive in moments of danger. \u201cWe all know that when we find ourselves in circumstances where we need help, whether a lion is chasing us, we are sick or our son has been wounded in Gaza, we automatically begin making requests. Something bursts out of us that can be called prayer.\u201cBut there is always tension between the collective ritual side, which depends on prayer as something ordered and structured, and personal prayer, which is free and spontaneous and in a sense responds to institutionalized prayer.\u201dHow does Judaism view prayer?\n\u201cIn the Bible itself, there is no commandment to pray. Prayer takes shape as something governed by laws and rules only toward the end of the first century, and it becomes a central religious obligation in both Judaism and Christianity.\u201cIt then develops into a powerful tool for creating an emotional community and producing a similar effect on the individual psyche. Just as all of us stand together during a memorial siren, we pray together in synagogue on Yom Kippur, cry together during Kol Nidre, move together and plead together.\u201cEven a secular person generally won\u2019t pray alone on Yom Kippur, but will come to synagogue and pray with the community. We felt something similar in Hostages Square, when the crowd became an emotional community whose members stood together shouting, \u2018Everyone now,\u2019 and a collective shiver went through us.\u201d(Photo: Shalev Shalom)Who were we shouting to?\n\u201cThat is a good question, and everyone will have their own explanation of who they are praying to. But before that comes the tremendous communal partnership expressing a shared longing. That is one of the original purposes of collective prayer, beyond the prayer of the individual.\u201cPrayer is not a situation in which someone is supposed to stand there asking for something, imagining that if they shout loudly enough there is some God in heaven collecting enough requests and that whoever asks nicely enough will have their wish granted.\u201dBut that is often what people are told: Pray, ask, focus and you will receive.\n\u201cThere have been major disputes over precisely this question since late antiquity. Thinkers already argued then that prayer is not supposed to change anything.\u201cGod cannot be manipulated. He does not perform magic and does not simply respond to requests. Prayer is instead an act of communion or conversation with the divine. For some thinkers it is an attempt by the soul to resemble or draw closer to the divine; for others it is part of serving God. But either way, it is not supposed to serve material, utilitarian goals.\u201cAnd if we look at reality, it is difficult to find support for the idea that prayers work in that direct utilitarian sense. Only a small proportion of people would say that their prayers were actually answered.\u201cWhat needs to be understood is that for most thinkers, prayer is not a mechanism for manipulating the divine or obtaining benefits from God through the act of praying. One indication is that personal requests occupy relatively little space in Jewish liturgy and sit at the margins of the prayer service.\u201cPrayer is general. It is not intended for one specific moment or one specific person. Above all, it is a conversation with God, or standing before God, as part of serving Him.\u201dDr. Shraga Bick: \u201cWhen we find ourselves in circumstances where we need help, we automatically begin making requests, and something bursts out of us that can be called prayer\u201dBick notes that for roughly the past two millennia, words have become one of the primary means by which people practice religious worship, making language itself a central ritual instrument, whether prayer takes place publicly or privately at home.If prayer is primarily an act of worship rather than a way to obtain things from God, why does distress so often trigger an automatic appeal for divine intervention, even when people know that the outcome they ask for may never come?Bick says that even when people understand the limits of prayer as a practical mechanism for changing reality, they may still hold on to the hope that prayer can somehow affect what happens to them.Baumgarten says the very act of articulating the request may itself carry psychological force. \u201cWhen we pray, we name our desire. We say and define what we want to happen,\u201d she says.\u201cGiving a name to the request we direct toward a supernatural figure, together with all the conditions surrounding prayer, creates a very powerful and basic psychological act.\u201cThe request itself and the effort, whether through fasting, singing, swaying together, concentrating or simply recognizing that \u2018now I am praying, I am wearing clean white clothes, I am concentrating and standing quietly,\u2019 can provide psychological comfort.\u201dFor Gefen Englard-Antebi, a drama therapist and lecturer at Levinsky-Wingate Academic College, prayer can also become a tool inside psychotherapy.About a year ago, as part of her doctoral work at Bar-Ilan University, she established what she describes as the first center in Israel, and possibly the world, devoted to emotional therapy through prayer. Her clinic now regularly treats dozens of patients using established psychological approaches while incorporating prayer as one of its central therapeutic tools.How does prayer become a psychological treatment tool?\n\u201cWhen the relationship with God enters the clinic, it is not only a treasure trove of the psyche. It also becomes a kind of litmus test through which we can examine different aspects of a person\u2019s emotional world and behavior, including their relationships.\u201cThere is so much valuable psychological information contained in the patient\u2019s relationship with God, including patterns of early attachment to parents and other key figures, that I would not necessarily be able to reach from other places. That is one of the things that happens in prayer-based therapy.\u201dHer central research question, she says, concerns what moves inside a person when they enter a living ritual of prayer, and what a person\u2019s manner of praying may reveal about their inner world.Her underlying premise is that prayer, among humanity\u2019s most ancient forms of reaching toward something greater than oneself, may offer a window into emotional processes that can otherwise remain hidden.And what about prayer during crisis, as an appeal to a higher power?\n\u201cThere are moments when we feel as though the boat of our life is being tossed around, and everyone experiences that somewhere different, with a partner, in a career, in something personal. Then a person seeks prayer as something that can hold the pain for us, the gap between reality and how we wish reality were.\u201cMany hostages who returned spoke about having conversations with God during captivity and genuinely feeling that someone was holding their hand.\u201cThe psychological movement of prayer contains both surrender and longing at the same time. On one hand, this is my situation: I am a hostage in Gaza. On the other hand, I have someone who can hold the hope for me that I will get out of here.\u201cWe saw differences in the hostages\u2019 relationships with God. According to their own accounts, some asked God how He was doing. Some made promises to Him. Some asked Him for signs. The mechanism was different for each person, but in all these cases there was a relationship with a power they believed was holding their hand, and they prayed with tremendous faith.\u201dAnd for someone who did not grow up in a religious home, how does that faith emerge?\n\u201cIt is never external. It is always internal. Faith truly occurs at the moment when you have examined your inner world and genuinely believe that you are worthy in your own eyes.\u201cWhen that happens, the inner process of connection and development arrives, and it can be an extraordinary process.\u201d" ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789898421.881756", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:37.607343+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:37.599945+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "Prayer as a lifeline: Why even secular people turn to God in times of crisis", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789898421.881756", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:37.566098+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--reject=js,mjs,woff,woff2,ttf,otf,eot,mp4,m4v,mov,webm,ogv,mkv,avi,flv", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "--timestamping", "https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:37.555085+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1789898421.881756", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-20T13:38:18.923756+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "Prayer as a lifeline: Why even secular people turn to God in times of crisis", "warc": null, "wget": "www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1789898421.881756", "newest_archive_date": "2026-09-20T13:38:39.436882+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-09-20T13:38:17.884783+00:00", "path": "/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "f65954b3-57a4-4ad6-998b-6985c03cff3a", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1789898421-import.txt" ], "tags": ",drudge,pool,war-wiki", "tags_str": "drudge,pool,war-wiki", "timestamp": "1789898421.881756", "title": "Prayer as a lifeline: Why even secular people turn to God in times of crisis", "updated": "2026-09-20T13:38:17.884601+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-09-20 13:38", "url": "https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/rjladw6tze" }