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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)