Five-Desires Prayer Experiment

The Five-Desires Prayer Experiment turns the idea of a limited God into a personal test: Judah Loeb names five desires, weighs them against one another, and prays without assurance that any will be granted. Chaim Lerner presents the exercise not as a promise of divine intervention but as an encounter with the limits of human control. Its three attempts trace a changing pattern of longing: Judah first chooses Michal above everything else, later begs for more time with Mary, and finally discovers that he can no longer identify one desire he would sacrifice the others to obtain.

Form and Theological Premise

The exercise grows out of Chaim’s challenge to think about prayer in the presence of suffering. His theology refuses the easy resolution that evil does not exist: in his account, the claims that God is all-powerful, God is wholly good, and evil exists cannot comfortably coexist. The prayer exercise carries that unresolved tension from abstract argument into Judah’s own life. Prayer remains possible, but it does not become a device for making the world obey.

Chaim and Judah experience the exercise as an experiment in approaching a limited God. At their first meeting after praying, both have red eyes. Chaim treats that visible emotion—not a confirmed miracle or a solution to the problem of suffering—as a plausible result in itself. Judah searches his pockets for a tissue and, finding none, receives one from Chaim. He wonders whether the exercise works like a birthday wish that cannot be disclosed without being lost; Chaim affirms the analogy. The exchange leaves the rules suggestive rather than fully explained: the wishes must be faced inwardly, and their relative importance becomes part of the test.

The First Trial: Choosing Michal

In the first attempt, Judah has four established wishes before he considers Michal. He wants a writing career; long lives for his parents and sister, whose deaths he has feared since childhood; continued control of his asthma; and a future rich in close friendships. He understands each as a genuine need, shaped by his anxieties about family loss, health, and his difficulty forming intimate friendships. He later regards the career, family, health, and friendship wishes as granted, including a substantial easing of his asthma less than a year after the prayer.

Michal changes the exercise’s balance. Judah initially feels so secure in their relationship that he thinks no prayer for her is necessary. Remembering Chaim’s instructions, however, he includes her. His love makes the other four wishes seem negligible: he is absorbed by the intimacy and physical closeness of a relationship that feels like his first experience of lasting romantic love. When forced to choose, he chooses Michal over career, family, health, and friendship. The wish he most wants is also the only one he does not receive. That result gives the exercise its first sharp distinction between the wishes Judah sees fulfilled and the desire that, for him, eclipses them all.

When they meet again, Judah and Chaim both appear close to tears. Chaim smiles at Judah and calls the experiment successful, measuring its outcome in part by their red eyes. The moment does not erase the failure of Judah’s most important wish. Instead, Chaim’s tissue and the exchange about undisclosed wishes give the exercise a modest, human consequence: prayer has brought the two men into a shared emotional encounter, even though it has not secured what Judah asked for.

The Second Trial: Mary and the Plea for More Time

Years later, the exercise returns under far more painful circumstances. After Mary steers a conversation toward Michal and the Lerners, Judah lies awake, troubled by fears for Mary and by memories of the earlier period. He recalls Chaim’s prayer experiment and decides to try it again, although he recognizes that the previous attempt did not bring him the wish he valued most.

This time the first four petitions concern Hannah’s health and happiness, the same for Ilana and Judah’s parents, a more fulfilling career, and the strength to become a better husband to Mary for whatever time remains to them. The fifth wish overwhelms the list before he can fully form it: a cure for Mary, more time with her, and a longer life for the person he loves most. Judah says that he would surrender even his hopes for his daughter to gain that time. The exercise thus repeats its earlier structure, but the overwhelming wish is no longer a young man’s hope for romantic love. It is a plea against impending loss.

The outcome feels catastrophic to Judah. Instead of receiving more time, he experiences the result as getting dramatically less. He considers whether the exercise has exposed the danger of placing every hope in one petition, whether God is mocking or punishing him, or whether the exercise is meaningless. None of these possibilities is established as the explanation. What the episode makes clear is the difference between the prayer’s concentrated desire and its uncontrollable result: the most urgent wish cannot compel the future to change.

The Third Trial and Its Changed Measure

Five years later, Judah tries the exercise again while sober, four years after leaving rehabilitation. He is on a date with a young widow he met through JDate, and, at her suggestion, they attend a musical Friday-night service for singles on the Upper West Side. The service’s rock band, clapping, and dancing give way to a silent prayer in which the rabbi permits the congregation either to use the prayer book or to pray from the heart. Judah chooses the latter and directs his petitions to his higher power, following Chaim’s method.

His five wishes are health for Hannah, sobriety for himself, career, his own health, and love. The final wish does not consume the others as Michal and Mary had done. Instead, its comparatively uncertain place exposes what Judah calls a hole in his heart: he does not know whether love will find a place in his life. When he considers which wish to relinquish, he finds no hierarchy among them and cannot choose one to hold onto with greater desperation. He leaves that choice to God.

This time Judah believes he receives all five wishes. He entertains several readings: perhaps the third attempt is the successful one, perhaps God finally intervenes on his behalf, or perhaps the whole exercise remains nonsense. The ending does not settle whether the outcome confirms divine action. Its important change is in Judah’s relation to the wishes: he no longer organizes them around one absolute demand, and he can neither rank nor surrender them. The exercise moves from the ache of an unmet singular desire toward a less certain acceptance of several needs held together.

Recurrence and Significance

The experiment’s meaning develops through repetition rather than proof. In the first trial, Judah’s emotional certainty that Michal is the one indispensable wish clarifies the cost of choosing. In the second, his plea for Mary makes that concentration desperate, while the outcome refuses the comfort he seeks. In the third, the absence of an all-consuming fifth wish becomes revealing in its own right. The exercise changes because Judah’s circumstances and capacity to rank his desires change, not because its uncertain theology produces a dependable rule.

Chaim’s limited-God framework gives the exercise a place between faith and resignation. It neither declares that prayer is useless nor treats prayer as a guarantee that suffering will be prevented. The red eyes after the first attempt, the tissue Chaim offers, and Judah’s later private repetitions are small, concrete signs of what the practice does achieve: it makes desire speakable and exposes what a person cannot bear to lose. Its unresolved final alternatives preserve the book’s central tension between seeking meaning and admitting that no explanation can make every outcome coherent.