No Pray-er There

Your chatbot will gladly compose a prayer for you.

Provide enough detail, and that prayer can be personalized to include your name, your spouse and children’s names, the specific needs you have for that day, and even some relevant scriptural references that you will find meaningful and coherent with your tradition.

You have, in short, a GenAI chaplain.  Or, if you’ll forgive me, “chat lain.”

Sometimes it seems bots are paying more attention to human spiritual needs than other humans do, especially in the “helping” professions.  Despite Viktor Frankl’s urging, more than 70 years ago, to consider psychiatric illness through what he called “existential analysis,” today’s psychiatry is directed largely at describing external phenomena and correcting chemical imbalances.  Canadian physician Brian Goldman, in his 2019 book The Power of Compassion, writes about the use of robots in the care of lonely elders in Japan, providing “companionship” when no human companions can be found.  University hospitals routinely have minimal chaplain coverage for hospitals with hundreds of beds, despite promises of “whole-person care.” Little wonder, then, that a lonely person in spiritual distress the night before major surgery might turn to a “chat lain” they can access online to cope with the unknown.

Whether due to economics, demographics, or an ideology that prizes “objective” data over “subjective” experience, spiritual and emotional care is rarely top priority.  Chaplains are often under pressure in their hospital systems to “quantify” how they are helping the patient, tying their worth to some “concrete” (i.e. economic) measure of benefit.  But we have no reliable yardstick for existential despair or ten-point scale for spiritual pain, and the lack of numerical support reinforces the decision not to invest in chaplaincy.

The vacuum that this creates is one of the forces fueling the rise of the “wellness” and “alternative medicine” movements, which for all their questionable scientific claims present with more warmth, individual concern, and attention to a person’s circumstances than mainstream medicine manages to do.  Whether they are overtly religious (many are) or not (and in these cases they are often rooted in New Age or indigenous healing practices), they scratch a vital itch that goes ignored in most hospitals and clinics.

That same vacuum has also led to the development of bots in mainstream helping professions to provide the care for which we can spare no human hands – or ears.  There are bots to spend time with children grieving the loss of a parent[1], and bots trained to take oral histories from aging veterans[2].  Why not a bot to say a prayer when the patient asks for a chaplain?

I want to offer an argument from the perspective of Jewish prayer.  Jewish prayer is a broad category of texts, composed over more than three thousand years, from the earliest Biblical texts like the six words of Sh’ma Yisrael (Listen, Israel), to prayers still being written by contemporary rabbis and laypeople as I am writing this article.  Despite this diversity and history most Jewish prayer serves one of three purposes: shevah (praise); hodayah (thanks or gratitude, acknowledging the good that God has done for us); or bakashah (request).

Prayers of praise and gratitude express an emotion we often call yir’ah, awe or even fear.  The 20^th century theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel preferred the English term “radical amazement.”  Hebrew, vocabulary poor in some areas, is rich in synonyms for this act: berakha; hallel and others.  A preliminary prayer before the Shabbat morning service contains nine different verbs for the praise that we are obligated to perform, lest we leave any out.  We begin each day by praising as soon as we awaken – praise for restoring our souls, for allowing us to tell day from night like the rooster, or for providing us the strength to take bold steps in the world.  One tradition teaches that a Jew should say at least 100 blessings (berakhot) every day.

Bakashah may ask for blessings a person, or more often the Jewish people as a whole, currently lack or worry will not continue as they are.  Health, rain in the proper season, punishment of slanderers, and the coming of the Messiah among others; the thrice-daily Amidah prayer contains thirteen standard requests of this kind.  On certain days, such as in times of drought, the prayers become especially plaintive, and rabbinic law dictates that the leader of prayers on such days must be a ragil – a regular person, who is respected by the community but not above the fray, one who is subject to the pain and deprivation of the crisis they are praying to end.

There are other forms of Jewish prayer as well, including a form of self-isolation called Hitboddedut.  When speaking of these forms collectively, however, we use one of two words: Avodah or Tefillah.

Avodah means “service,” but not in the sense of a prayer service.  It refers to service to God, applying equally to the sacrificial rites described in the Torah and the service of our words that we perform today.  Prayer-as-service takes special intent, kavvanah, to avoid becoming the type of service we all know deserves our scorn: literal “lip service,” prayers that are spoken but not felt, and certainly not acted upon with sincerity.

While usually translated as “prayer,” tefillah comes from the root p-l-l, which means “interrogate.”  The verb for prayer is lehitpallel, a reflexive verb meaning, “to interrogate oneself.”  Jewish prayer is the first, essential step in examining one’s own actions, taking stock of one’s shortcomings, and challenging oneself, in the current vernacular, to “be better.”  For example, to recognize when we have performed avodah, said prayers, without the proper intent.  The prophet Isaiah rails against this kind of behavior when he speaks of the wealthy who fast, put on sackcloth, and reverently bow their heads, then leave the Temple to go home and oppress their workers.  A Jew praying today is supposed to turn this prophetic lens of critique upon themselves, to see where they have stumbled and step back onto the path.

A chatbot cannot feel yir’ah.  It cannot know the pain of deprivation or scarcity and certainly cannot be enough of a ragil to claim to have “skin in the game” in a time of crisis.  And while GenAI is quite good at improving its future performance by incorporating feedback on past performance, it does so entirely without guilt, self-awareness, regret, or remorse – don’t let the obsequious “Great point!  I really like the way you phrased that correction!” responses fool you.  When it comes to “chatlains,” there is simply no pray-er they-er.

So why do even some deeply religious people sometimes turn to GenAI to compose prayer for them?

Prayer is hard.  We struggle to produce words that adequately express our awe, our longing, or our regret – but a bot with access to an entire Internet worth of other people’s eloquent words can come up with something that “sounds right.”

The Hassidim understood the challenge of the tongue-tied would-be pray-er.  A widely told story attributed to Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (early 18^th c.) relates that a shepherd boy came to pray on Yom Kippur at the rabbi’s synagogue.  He did not know the prayers and instead made repeated attempts to pull a flute out of his pocket, which would be forbidden on Shabbat and holidays.  His father succeeded in stopping him until the very conclusion of the service, when he finally overcame his father’s efforts and blew a loud blast on the flute.  Rather than rebuke him, the rabbi finished his own prayer and praised the boy for having played what was in his heart.[3]

Our prayers do not need to be perfect.  This is one of the reasons we pray from a set text much of the time.  Even then, we add a line after the conclusion of every Amidah that says, “May the words of my mouth and the logic of my heart be desirable before You, God, my Rock and my Redeemer.”  We don’t need an eloquent bot to arrange our prayers for us, only a receptive Creator who knows what to do with our jumbled words and half-formed thoughts.  The act of prayer, and the genuine anguish in the heart, is what matters.  A human chaplain’s job isn’t to make our words sound nicer.  It is to provide presence and accompaniment as we experience the anguish and struggle with the act – presence from someone who is ragil, accustomed to feeling those same things themselves.

But a human is certainly capable of “going through the motions” of prayer to a degree that we could honestly say that there is no “logic in their heart,” even as there are words in their mouth – even perfect, by-the-book words.  How, then, would that be any different than the bot, than the “chatlain,” when the pray-er is a human who is doing their grocery list with 99% of their attention and keeping their place on the page with the other 1%?

I practice one of the more “presence” oriented disciplines in medicine, primary care.  We tell ourselves that our relationship with the patient matters more than any bit of technology that might replace us.  The radiologists or the pathologists might be on their way out but not us.  Yet in the continually quickening pace of primary care, where more responsibilities are being piled upon each practitioner to meet “metrics” that measure things that may or may not actually matter, our presence begins to suffer.  A mistaken belief that engaging with a patient fully is too time-consuming or might burn us out because we get too close to their pain and suffering, leads primary care healers to focus on checking the boxes, completing the exam by rote, sticking to the algorithms for diagnosis and treatment, and referring complex patients onward.  And though we might want to deny it, providing services we can’t get paid for often takes a back seat to more lucrative procedures or higher “volume” of less needy patients.  If there is so little intent, so little presence, so little humanity, why couldn’t GenAI do it better than us?

The science fiction master Isaac Asimov tackled this conundrum decades ago in his “robot novels.”  In the first, Caves of Steel, a character describes a synergy of robots and humans called “see-fee” (pronouncing aloud C-Fe, for “carbon (humans) – iron (robots)”).  The unique talents of each would be yoked together in a society where humans could continue to thrive while robots handled the things for which they were better suited than humans – repetitive tasks, precision measurements, rapid processing of data.  Humans would naturally gravitate towards intuitive leaps, creative endeavors – and relationships of mutual understanding.

If we want medicine – or chaplaincy – to remain firmly human fields, then we need to lean into the humanity of what we do.  We need doctors who exhibit true yir’ah, radical amazement, at the wonders of the human beings they care for, (and for those of us who believe, the Creator who brought them into existence).  We need healers who are regilim, accustomed to suffering, and able to stand next to it unflinchingly to accompany those who are experiencing it, praying earnestly from our hearts for its relief and engaging all our skills – and the technologies at our disposal, if it comes to that – to effect that relief if we can.  And we need helping professionals who, through their own ability to self-critique, not a code written into software, can identify their shortcomings and strive to “be better.”  If we can “be prayer” in this way, if we can exemplify the best of what makes us human, our work will remain firmly in our hands.

If not, then we don’t have a pray-er.[4]

Check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Healing People, Not Patients,” where my guests Drs. Warren Kinghorn and Abraham Nussbaum consider what sets a great psychiatrist apart from an AI – or a vending machine.  www.healerswholisten.com/podcast, Ep. 15, https://open.spotify.com/episode/4DZ0nv4idN6ooccD3LdzqS?si=66a9cb854763400f, or wherevery you like to listen to podcasts.

[1] Yockel MR et. al.  Mental Health Professionals’ Views on Artificial Intelligence as an Aide for Children Anticipating or Suffering the Loss of a Parent to Cancer: Helpful or Harmful?  Children.  2025, 12, 763.

[2] Bains B et. al.  Large Language Model–Enabled Editing of Patient Audio Interviews From “This Is My Story” Conversations: Comparative Study.  JMIR Med Inform.  2026 Jan 9;14:e80205. doi: 10.2196/80205

[3] Dr. Menachem Katz, on The Gemara.com.  https://thegemara.com/article/the-baal-shem-tov-and-the-boy-who-played-flute-on-yom-kippur/ Katz cites the version of the story published in S. Y. Agnon’s book Yamim Nora’im (Days of Awe) (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1937), but notes other, earlier versions, including some that attempt to eliminate the problematic use of a forbidden musical instrument and have the boy recite the letters of the alef-bet (Hebrew alphabet) instead, asking God to “arrange the letters to make the prayers you want.”

[4] With great appreciation to Rabbi Kara Tav, Rev. Gaea Thompson, and Mary Moon for their feedback and insights on an earlier draft of this essay, and to Mary for inviting Rev. Thompson and me to participate in the panel discussion that led to this essay in the first place.