Judah’s five-petition prayer experiment

Judah’s five-petition prayer experiment is both a spiritual exercise and a recurring experiment in desire. The procedure, associated with Chaim Lerner’s challenge to approach a limited God, asks Judah Loeb to name five wishes and confront the question of which one he would surrender if only four could be granted. Across three attempts, the exercise turns prayer into a measure of love, fear, selfishness, grief, and recovery: Judah’s first list reveals that Michal overwhelms every competing good; the second, made while Mary is dying, converts hope into desperate bargaining; and the third, undertaken after sobriety and amid the possibility of new love, produces an unexpected balance rather than a single consuming wish.

Origin and First Experiment

The experiment begins with Chaim Lerner’s attempt to make prayer concrete rather than doctrinal. Judah cannot comfortably enter conventional liturgy: torn prayer books are nearby, but he does not understand the Hebrew and would not identify with the translated words even if a translation were available. Instead, he follows Chaim’s instructions and directs a finite set of personal desires toward a higher power. The exercise therefore sits uneasily between religious ritual and psychological inventory. It gives Judah a form for prayer while preserving his suspicion that the God being addressed may be limited, inconsistent, or nonexistent.

Judah’s first four petitions are practical and biographical. He asks for a writing career and later becomes a journalist. He asks that his parents and sister live long lives, a request shaped by his childhood fear of death through accident, fire, flood, car crash, or an unexpected fall. He asks for health and control over his asthma, which improves considerably less than a year later. He also asks for a future filled with good friends, despite his shyness, anxiety, insecurity, and difficulty moving from joking sociability into genuine intimacy; that wish, too, appears to be granted over time.

Michal is different from the other wishes because she does not merely occupy one place on the list. Judah is deliriously in love with her and initially considers leaving her off precisely because his attachment makes the experiment too easy: beside Michal, career, family, health, and friendship seem insignificant. His love is associated with a series of intimate first experiences—waking beside a woman, physical contact, long kisses, naked closeness, and wild sexual pleasure that has not yet become intercourse—and these experiences are intensified by his conviction that Michal is his one true love. He nevertheless includes her and chooses her over the other four desires. The result is the experiment’s first decisive contradiction: the wish Judah values most is the only one he does not receive.

The Experiment as Encounter

After the first attempt, Judah meets Chaim again near the man distributing cardboard yarmulkes. Judah is startled by tears filling his eyes without falling down his cheeks, as though an invisible barrier prevents him from fully weeping. Chaim also has red eyes and is blowing his nose. Their shared bodily reaction makes the exercise more than an abstract theological demonstration: prayer has produced vulnerability, grief, and an uncertain form of communion even without supplying the desired outcome.

Chaim interprets the scene with characteristic humor, telling Judah that the experiment has succeeded because they approached the limited God, prayed, and emerged with red eyes. His formulation shifts the standard of success from receiving a wish to undergoing an encounter. Judah, still trying to understand the rules, asks whether the exercise resembles blowing out birthday candles, in which revealing the wish would prevent its fulfillment. Chaim laughs because he takes the question as a joke, although Judah is serious. The mismatch matters: Chaim treats uncertainty as comic and intellectually productive, while Judah remains caught between literal hope and disbelief.

Repetition, Mary, and Catastrophe

Years later, Mary’s illness and Judah’s fear of losing her reactivate the experiment. In bed with Mary during what he does not know will be one of their last nights together, Judah cannot sleep because anxiety about her mingles with memories of Michal, the Lerners, and Chaim’s death. He remembers that the earlier experiment failed, but failure no longer disqualifies prayer. If God often fails, Judah reasons, there is still no reason not to try again, even while he does not believe in the God he addresses.

This second list begins with health and happiness for Hannah, the same for Ilana and Judah’s parents, a more fulfilling career, and the strength to become a better husband to Mary during whatever time remains. The fifth petition is the overwhelming one: a cure, more time, and a longer life for Mary, described as the love of Judah’s life. Before the request is even fully formed, it makes the other petitions appear puny and irrelevant. Judah recognizes that he would surrender his hopes for his daughter in exchange for additional time with Mary. The structure of the exercise thus exposes not a calm hierarchy of values but the moral extremity of grief: love becomes so concentrated that every other obligation is nearly erased.

The result is more catastrophic than the first. Instead of giving Judah more time with Mary, life gives him dramatically less. He imagines this as divine mockery or punishment for assisting Chaim’s heresies, then considers a less personalized theological lesson: the exercise may be warning against placing every hope in one basket. Finally, he allows the possibility that the entire framework is meaningless. Prayer here functions simultaneously as plea, accusation, theological speculation, and self-indictment; its failure does not settle whether God is cruel, limited, hidden, or absent.

Third Attempt and Changed Desire

Judah repeats the exercise five years later, four years after rehabilitation and four years into sobriety. The setting is markedly different: he is on a date with a young widow met through JDate, and the evening begins at a musical Friday-night service for singles on the Upper West Side. The service combines prayer with a rock band, chanting, handclapping, and dancing in the aisle. When the silent prayer arrives, Judah has not looked at a siddur since his earlier visit to the Kotel with Chaim, yet the rabbi permits worshippers either to use the prayer-book words or to pray what is in their hearts. Judah again chooses the latter route and addresses his petitions to a higher power.

The five wishes now reveal a changed life. He asks for Hannah’s health, his own sobriety, a career, his own health, and finally love. Unlike the earlier attempts, the fifth petition does not immediately consume the other four. The absence of an all-consuming need exposes a hole in Judah’s heart, but it also shows that his desires have become capable of existing beside one another. He cannot identify a proper hierarchy or decide which wish should be sacrificed, so he leaves that decision to God rather than forcing the list into a dramatic contest.

This time Judah receives all five wishes. He entertains several explanations: perhaps the third time is the charm; perhaps the old God finally intervenes on his behalf; perhaps, more likely, the whole exercise remains bullshit. The conclusion is deliberately unresolved. The apparent success does not prove divine benevolence, just as the earlier failures did not prove divine hostility. What changes most clearly is Judah’s relation to desire. Michal once eclipsed every good, and Mary’s threatened death later eclipsed even his hopes for Hannah; after sobriety, no single petition possesses that destructive supremacy.

Theological and Narrative Significance

The experiment gives material form to the book’s concern with a limited God and with the problem of interpreting suffering. It refuses the neat logic that good outcomes demonstrate faith and bad outcomes demonstrate punishment. Judah becomes a journalist, gains friends, and experiences relief from asthma, but he does not receive Michal. He asks for more time with Mary and receives less. He later asks for five less absolute goods and receives them all, yet remains unconvinced. The sequence makes divine causality impossible to verify while making human desire increasingly legible.

Its repetitions also turn prayer into a record of Judah’s emotional history. The first attempt is organized around erotic discovery and the shock of losing the person who seems to complete the world. The second is organized around impending bereavement and the willingness to trade away other loves for Mary’s survival. The third follows rehabilitation and sobriety, when the absence of a single overwhelming need becomes itself a discovery. Repeating the same form does not produce the same self; each return reveals what has changed in the petitioner.

Finally, the experiment joins speech to action. Naming a wish does not reliably make it true, but it changes the speaker’s relation to competing obligations. Judah’s petitions expose what he would sacrifice, whom he fears losing, and whether he can tolerate a life in which goods remain plural and unresolved. The experiment therefore succeeds even when prayer fails: it makes desire visible, stages Judah’s arguments with God, and converts uncertainty into a recurring narrative method rather than a problem that can be conclusively solved.