Chaim's five-petition prayer exercise

Chaim's five-petition prayer exercise is a spiritual experiment that makes Judah Loeb rank his deepest desires before a God whose existence and power he doubts. Its five requests become a way of measuring what he is willing to lose for what he most wants. Repeated across love, bereavement, and sobriety, the exercise yields no stable theology: one petition overwhelms the rest, another seems answered in reverse, and a later attempt appears to grant all five. Its force lies in that unresolved pattern, not in a dependable promise of results.

The experiment and its first test

Chaim Lerner's challenge asks Judah to direct petitions toward God despite his uncertainty about prayer. When Judah first tries it, he thinks of reaching for one of the torn prayer books nearby, but knows he would not understand the Hebrew or identify with the words. The only liturgical line that comes to mind is a Rolling Stones lyric about not always getting what one wants but sometimes finding what one needs. The improvised prayer thus begins between inherited religious language that feels inaccessible and a popular song that offers a limited, almost comic consolation.

Judah names five desires: a writing career, long lives for his parents and sister, control over his asthma, lasting friendships, and Michal. Several of the first four already have histories behind them. He had feared since childhood that his family would die in an accident; he carried an inhaler for asthma; and, shy and anxious at Northwestern University, he struggled to make close friends. He later regards his prayers for a career, his family's longevity, improved asthma, and future friendships as granted. The exercise brings these different hopes into one reckoning rather than treating prayer as a single request detached from a life.

Michal and the wish that eclipses the others

At first, Judah considers leaving Michal off the list because his love for her feels so complete that there is nothing to add. Their intimacy is new to him: waking beside a woman, kissing, being naked and entangled, and discovering physical pleasure together. The experiences matter not only as firsts but because they are shared with the person he believes is his one true love. That certainty makes the prayer challenge seem almost too easy: the other four wishes pale beside her.

Judah includes Michal anyway. Following Chaim's instruction, he chooses her over career, family, health, and friendship, telling God to give him Michal if he can receive only one-fifth of what he wants. This is the one wish he does not get. The distinction gives the exercise its emotional asymmetry: the requests Judah can later count as fulfilled do not compensate for the particular love that dominates the list and remains absent. The experiment measures desire less by the number of petitions answered than by the one loss that makes the others feel small.

Afterward, Judah meets Chaim again near the man handing out cardboard yarmulkes. Both men have red eyes; Judah's tears do not fall onto his cheeks, and Chaim blows his nose. Chaim treats the shared emotion as evidence that they have approached the limited God through prayer and emerged visibly affected. Judah asks whether the practice works like blowing out birthday candles: perhaps a wish must remain undisclosed to come true. Chaim says that it does. Chaim laughs at first, taking Judah's question for a joke, while Judah means it seriously. The exchange leaves secrecy inside the experiment as another uncertainty rather than explaining why some wishes arrive and others do not.

Repeating the prayer in fear and grief

Years later, with Mary beside him in bed, Judah remembers Chaim's experiment while fears for Mary mingle with memories of Michal and the Lerners. He tries the exercise again, despite believing that its earlier failure is consistent with a God who often fails. This time he asks for health and happiness for Hannah, the same for Ilana and his parents, a more fulfilling career, and the strength to be a better husband to Mary for whatever time they have left. His fifth petition is a cure and a longer life for Mary, the person he calls the love of his life.

As with Michal, the final desire overwhelms the preceding four before Judah has fully formed it. He says he would give up all the others, even his hopes for his daughter, in exchange for more time with Mary. The outcome feels worse than the first attempt: instead of gaining time, he gets dramatically less. He entertains several incompatible explanations—that God is mocking or punishing him for helping Chaim's heresies, that the exercise warns against putting everything in one basket, or that the whole practice is nonsense. Mary had been urging him to talk about Michal and Chaim, and Judah connects those memories to her preoccupation with suicide; he does not tell her anything that would challenge the accepted account of Chaim's death. The prayer occurs in the shadow of Mary's own impending death, but gives Judah no consoling account of why the request for more time fails.

A changed relationship to wanting

Five years later, Judah tries the exercise a third time, four years after rehabilitation and four years into sobriety. On a date with a young widow he met through JDate, he attends a musical Friday-night service for singles on the Upper West Side. The service's rock band, clapping, and dancing give way to silent prayer. Judah has not opened a siddur since the day at the Western Wall Site with Chaim; when the rabbi invites the congregation either to use the prayer book or to pray from the heart, Judah again follows Chaim's instruction and addresses his petitions to a higher power.

The first four requests are health for Hannah, sobriety for himself, a career, and his own health. The fifth takes longer. Previously, the final wish had consumed the others; now no single need has that force, and Judah recognizes the absence itself as a hole in his heart. He settles on love, leaving its place in his present life to his higher power. When he considers which wishes to surrender, he finds no hierarchy among them and cannot choose one to abandon or another to protect with desperation. He leaves that decision to God as well.

This time, Judah says, he receives all five. He considers whether the third attempt is the charm or whether God finally intervenes on his behalf, then returns to the possibility that the exercise is nonsense. The ending does not resolve that skepticism. Instead, it marks a change in the experiment's emotional logic: Judah still brings his needs to prayer, but no longer has one overwhelming desire by which to rank them. The repeated five petitions trace not a reliable method for obtaining wishes, but the changing shape of longing—from the beloved who eclipses every other hope, through the desperate wish for more time, to a life in which love is wanted without yet being able to name how it might fit.