Offering One Another a Blessing of Healing

Posted on May 27, 2026 by Rabbi Noah Diamondstein

Dear friends,

Throughout the year, as we have focused on making Temple Beth-El a source of spiritual wellness and mental health self-care, we have offered healing services on the fifth Friday of the four months each year that contain five Fridays. This Friday is the fifth Friday of May, and our Shabbat services will again include a short healing service in lieu of a traditional rabbinic sermon. These Fifth-Friday services are always meaningful, featuring beautiful music, slight augmentations to our congregation’s ritual toolbox and, as always, the full warmth of our community.

At our service this week, during the healing portion, we will hear a few melodies that are on the newer side for our community. I wanted to send you links to each of them, so that over the next couple of days you can take a listen in your free time and make them a bit more familiar in time for Friday night services. They are:

• This wonderful setting of Hashkiveinu by Debbie Friedman
• This chant entitled “This Is A Wave” by Sarina Partridge that I taught at services last Friday night
• This beautiful setting of words from Ps. 59 by R. Josh Warshawsky
• This beautiful setting of Ps. 16:8 from Nava Tehila, which uses the word “Havayah” as a name for god, a reordering of the four Hebrew letters of God’s Name into the modern Hebrew word for ‘experience,’ a favorite bit of modern God language

I hope you’ll listen to these, and help us lift them up in prayer this Friday!

Our parashah this week (and last, due to Shavuot) is Parashat Naso, which features the Priestly Benediction. These ancient words were offered by the Priests over us as a blessing for safety, enlightenment, grace, and peace. Since those ancient days, the words have been repurposed into family blessings around the Shabbat table and clergy blessings over students and congregants on bimah’s the world over. Gather with us this Shabbat, so that we might each be a priest in each other’s lives, giving of our spiritual resources to help fill one another’s cups and have our own filled in turn.

Bir’fuah uv’rachah, in healing and blessing,

Rabbi Noah Diamondstein