El na refa na lah (Numbers 12:13) — These are the words Moshe uses to cry out to God on behalf of his sister Miriam when she is afflicted by a skin disease after gossiping about him and his Cushite wife.
O Lord please heal her. Translated word for word it reads: Lord, please, heal, please, her. The words form a perfect chiastic structure — A B C B A. Healing stands in the middle as a highlighted apex, with the word na, please, on either side, and the two entities that need joining, God and her, the ailing one, on the outer rim.
Moshe shows us how to pray for healing in the simplest, most direct and sincere way. What is healing, and perhaps also, what is prayer? They are the bridging of God and “her”, the creation of a holy space in the middle, where heaven and earth meet in the care of our very human woundedness.
The way that we reach for this sacred middle — the road there — is na, please, a word of existential longing, the most basic word of prayer, a cry for help, an expression of faith that there is something beyond us that can support us — please, please; the soul reaches up toward heaven in yearning and hope.
We begin on the outside, with God and the wounded one far apart and we work our way, through this na, a reaching up of arms, to that sacred middle place where we meet God — refa, heal. Only in this place of joining, this place where we are aware of both poles — of our vulnerability, our pain, our very aching need for healing on the one side and on the other side also the presence of an eternal, whole, vast being that can hold and heal that pain — only here can we heal. Here, in the middle, after the energetic reaching of na, we come to rest. We are hurt, but we are also connected, and in feeling both, we begin to heal.
Staying in that sacred middle is not easy. We have a tendency to go to either one of the extremes; we are either flooded with pain, completely overtaken by it and identified with it — no space or perspective at all — or we have escaped the pain momentarily by lifting ourselves out of this human realm into the divine plane. This second alternative may seem appealing, and indeed it is a helpful tool — knowing how to let go of the pain and become temporarily part of some other higher realm — but it does not provide long term relief; the pain comes back, perhaps indirectly or unconsciously, but just as strong if not stronger, because something in us needs tending to, and will keep calling out until it is heard. This way of escaping pain has a name — “spiritual bypassing” — indicating our tendency to try, sometimes even through God, to avoid the wounds, to circumnavigate them — really, abandon them — by trying to escape our very human vulnerability.
So the call here — el na refa na lah — is not to inhabit either the El or the Lah but to make our way to the middle ground of Refa — where we know of the pain — we come close enough to touch it and feel it and know it needs something — but we don’t get swallowed whole by it. Through the simple prayer of na, please, we bring the pain into a space that also knows the divine presence, a middle ground where heaven and earth meet inside us to heal what needs healing. Healing cannot happen without a real holding and knowing of both the reality of the suffering and the spacious presence of the divine.
This place of healing is the mishkan (tabernacle) that we build inside us for God to dwell in. The physical mishkan — like the word refa — also stood in the middle — in the middle of the camp, amidst the people, surrounded on all sides by tribes as they travelled. Inside us, in our own heart center, we have such a place, too, a place where our most vulnerable human parts can meet God and be held and healed.
El na refa na lah. Call out for God and your pain to come together in that sacred place inside you, a place of connection and healing. O Lord, please — Refa. Rest in that space, and then send some love back out, as Moshe did — send out that healing to all who need it, physically and emotionally, to all who need to feel that shared space, to know that they are not alone in their pain
