Petitioning God on Shabbat is generally restricted, but what does that mean for praying for the sick?

We often imagine Shabbat as the day when prayer reaches its peak. Services are indeed longer, but this results mainly from extended Torah reading, the addition of psalms, and the Musaf Amidah. Paradoxically, the Amidah, itself is shorter. Unlike the weekday versions, it omits the central petitionary section of thirteen blessings, the very heart of daily prayer. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein once remarked that weekday prayer is defined by angst: “Distress and outcry are at its core. Anguish is its middle name.” Shabbat, by contrast, insists on a different tone.

The Jerusalem Talmud bluntly declares: “It is forbidden for one to demand his needs on Shabbat” (yShabbat 15:3, 78b). Maimonides codified the same principle: “It is forbidden to fast, to cry out, to plead, or to beg mercy on Shabbat” (MT Shabbat 30:12). Why such restrictions? Commentators give two reasons. First, confronting illness or crisis arouses pain and disrupts the sanctity and joy of the day. Second, such concerns resemble weekday “business,” violating the ban on mundane speech. The Sages asserted that even comforting mourners and visiting the sick were permitted only with hesitation.

One sage, when leaving a patient on Shabbat, avoided direct prayers for healing. Instead, he would say, “It is Shabbat, when one is prohibited to cry out. Healing is soon to come, His compassion abundant; rest on Shabbat in peace” (Shabbat 12a–b). In this view, the merit of Shabbat itself, not petitionary words, elicits divine mercy.

Yet the Sages did not ignore moments of true emergency. In times of communal danger, such as when a city faced siege or flood, special prayers were mandated even on Shabbat (Taanit 19a). This precedent, codified in halakha (OC 288:9), has guided contemporary rabbis who permitted public petitions on Shabbat. The Talmud extended the dispensation to individuals pursued by thieves or hostile enemies (Taanit 22b).

Just as one may violate Shabbat to save life, so too one may “violate” its spiritual repose with urgent prayer for deliverance (Ritva).

Later authorities debated the scope. Some limited the exception strictly to extraordinary threats, excluding prayers for the sick. Others allowed petitions only for those gravely ill, expected to die on Shabbat itself. Yet as Rabbi Binyamin Hamberger has documented, some sages, spurred by on popular practice, widened the circle. Communities began to recite prayers for the ill, even when not critically sick or in imminent danger of dying that day. As a compromise, some rabbis recommended adjusting the prayer itself to insert the phrase, “Since Shabbat is not a time for outcry,” thereby softening petition into blessing (Magen Avraham 288). This formula evolved into the familiar mi sheberach prayer for healing, recited durng Torah reading. It preserves Shabbat’s atmosphere while acknowledging the human need to pray for those in need.

The High Holidays, however, are different. They are days of judgment, when “the Books of Life and Death are open before us,” as we state in our prayers. On such days, open pleas for mercy are entirely appropriate (Mateh Efraim 584:25). As Rabbi Menachem Ha-Meiri asserted, “Everything is incidental to the essential point, which is prayer, submission of the will, total commitment to God, and praise and thanksgiving” (Magen Avot 24).  In fact, while Ashkenazic communities typically omit Avinu Malkeinu when Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur falls on Shabbat, Sephardic custom recites it regardless, a position that the medieval communities of Provence also maintained with the Meiri’s support.  

The tension between restraint and outcry is not merely technical. It teaches us how to pray with discipline. Shabbat’s restriction is not indifference but a deliberate act of sanctity. Halakha preserves the day as one of rest and peace. We visit the sick with blessing, not lament, and reserve cries of distress for the most acute dangers, like war, pursuit, flood. That restraint prevents Shabbat from becoming a weekly crisis bulletin, its rest consumed by constant anxiety. As Rabbi Lichtenstein noted, “On Shabbat, we do not escape either the state or the sense of need. That would deny our creaturely humanity. We do, however, reorient our needs.”