Leo Baeck College in Finchley has produced a booklet of healing prayers and reflections for the coronavirus crisis.
Compiled by its dean and director of Jewish studies Rabbi Charles Middleburgh, the 20-page publication features contributions from local rabbis and students at the Progressive rabbinic academy, as well as from rabbis overseas.
In a “re-envisioned” version of Psalm 23 (The Lord is my Shepherd), Rabbi Middleburgh writes: “Even when we pass through polluted streets and places of contagion, we will not be afraid.”
In one prayer, Rabbi Leah Doberne-Schor of Beth Israel Congregation in Florence, South Carolina, asks God to “help us to find the inner strength to be patient when our nerves are tested”.
Trisha Arlen offers a 20-second prayer over hand-washing and Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner — from the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation in Michigan — presents a vidui, a deathbed confession at a time of plague.
The publication can be downloaded from the college’s website, www.lbc.ac.uk
