Recently, our daughter-the-rabbi (Aviva Fellman, Worcester, Mass.) forwarded to me a number of blessings/prayers/meditations one may recite upon receiving a Covid-19 vaccination. Such expressions of relief, of gratitude, are rightly proliferating online, and I encourage every person who goes for a shot to print out and take this page (or similar texts from other sources) along. And to pray one or more of the offerings I have compiled: click here for some meaningful texts. (The PDF accessed through the link will print more clearly than the png image below.)

Praying is more than reading the words on the page of a siddur, or reciting them from memory. Our liturgical lives may seem limited by millennia of rabbinic dictum and by the printing press; nonetheless, the structure of our services can support those who thrive in the environment of the expected.

Our tradition also encourages us to pray from the heart, in our own words, whenever we wish, even during the codified services. In the amida prayer, integral to every service every day, we acknowledge “[God’s] miracles that attend us each day.” We should view science as among them. And we should express gratitude for the knowledge and skill to enable science to benefit humankind.

May we be generous in our thanks and may we seek ways to share this beneficence in a timely fashion with those less wealthy and privileged as these United States. Let us encourage our governmental leadership to generously help facilitate the distribution of vaccines to countries with needs that are greater than their treasuries.