Mi Shebeirach

This article is about the prayer. For the musical scale, see Misheberak scale.

On the right, a cantor sings into a microphone. Standing to his left on the bimah (stage), another man sings along and strums a guitar. Both are wearing tallitot (prayer shawls) atop suits, and the cantor is visibly wearing a kippah (skullcap); the guitarist is positioned such that his kippah is not visible to the camera.
Cantor Mo Glazman and guitarist Saul Kaiserman of Congregation Emanu-El of New York chant Debbie Friedman's setting of the Mi Shebeirach for healing on Rosh Hashanah AM 5777 (2016 CE).

A Mi Shebeirach[he 1] is a Jewish prayer used to request a blessing from God. Dating to the 10th or 11th century CE, Mi Shebeirach prayers are used for a wide variety of purposes. Originally in Hebrew but sometimes recited in the vernacular, different versions at different times have been among the prayers most popular with congregants. In contemporary Judaism, a Mi Shebeirach serves as the main prayer of healing, particularly among liberal Jews,[b] to whose rituals it has become central.

The original Mi Shebeirach, a Shabbat prayer for a blessing for the whole congregation, originated in Babylonia as part of or alongside the Yekum Purkan prayers. Its format—invoking God in the name of the patriarchs (and in some modern settings the matriarchs) and then making a case that a specific person or group should be blessed—became a popular template for other prayers, including that for a person called to the Torah and those for life events such as brit milah (circumcision) and b'nai mitzvah. The Mi Shebeirach for olim (those called to the Torah) was for a time the central part of the Torah service for less educated European Jews.

Since the late medieval period, Jews have used a Mi Shebeirach as a prayer of healing. Reform Jews abolished this practice in the 1800s as their conception of healing shifted to be more based in science, but the devastation of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s saw a re-emergence in gay and lesbian synagogues. Debbie Friedman's Hebrew–English version of the prayer, which she and her then-partner, Rabbi Drorah Setel,[13] wrote in 1987, has become the best-known setting. Released in 1989 on the album And You Shall Be a Blessing and spread through performances at Jewish conferences, the song became Friedman's best-known work and led to the Mi Shebeirach for healing not only being reintroduced to liberal Jewish liturgy but becoming one of the movement's central prayers. Many congregations maintain "Mi Shebeirach lists" of those to pray for, and it is common for Jews to have themselves added to them in anticipation of a medical procedure; the prayer is likewise widely used in Jewish hospital chaplaincy. Friedman and Setel's version and others like it, born of a time when HIV was almost always fatal, emphasize spiritual renewal rather than just physical rehabilitation, a distinction stressed in turn by liberal Jewish scholars.

  1. ^ Millgram 1971, p. 188.
  2. ^ Fields 2021.
  3. ^ Eisenberg 2004.
  4. ^ Millgram 1971.
  5. ^ Nulman 1993.
  6. ^ Silverman 2016.
  7. ^ Praglin 1999; Pelc Adler 2011.
  8. ^ Sered 2005.
  9. ^ Flam 1996, pp. 486–488; Silton et al. 2009; Cutter 2011a.
  10. ^ Flam 1996, p. 493; Cutter 2011b.
  11. ^ Eger 2020, § Mi Shebeirachs (Blessings after the Torah Reading), p. 91.
  12. ^ Silverman 2016, pp. 170, 173.
  13. ^ Cite error: The named reference drinkwater-lesbian was invoked but never defined (see the help page).


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