When Mordechai took up residence on a Hindu ashram in India, I closed my siddur, and raised my arms in surrender

The college classroom is abuzz with the most recent news. Shai Kramer, helicopter crash survivor, has been declared clinically dead by a panel of superior medical experts.

We debate the merits of additional prayer for Yeshaya ben Chana Aliza, considering his condition. You’d think we were a group of high school girls at best, or on-the-edge young adults at worst. Quite the contrary; we are a clan of sophisticated 35+-year-olds preparing to reenter the workforce and completing requisite graduate-level courses to that end.

The latest newsfeed, which already makes all the rounds before Professor Drew enters, is that they’re telling us there is no longer any point in praying — “they” being the fully accredited and licensed harbingers of anything newsworthy, and extremely close friends with Shai Kramer’s third cousins once removed. My iPhone tells me the news has been posted on all the Jewish news sites — the medical part of the news, that is. The medical headline is that the brain is dead, the heart almost so, and the body is being kept alive by a labyrinth of pipes, artificial pulses and pressures, and myriad medications. The religious implication is left for everyone to infer and gossip about until consensus is achieved … or not.

Not that I plan on praying — not at all. We don’t pray for public miracles. A prayer for Shai to awaken from the vortex of darkness and death that beckons is a prayer requesting a grand-scale miracle, the likes of which are few and far between, and even then not without a dubiously happy ending.

There is no reason for me to pray — none at all. The odds are stacked against Shai, and who do I think I am to imagine that I can intervene? Besides which, I don’t even know who Shai is! Does the tzadeikes who started the Tehillim chain-call early this morning really believe that my puny prayer for the restoration of a full quality life for a stranger named Shai can have any impact Up There? Can my prayer gather any momentum to effect the reversal of G-d’s Will? Seriously!

Yael tells me that when she went to daven at her father’s kever the other day, Shai’s family was praying at his grandfather’s tombstone. They were grateful to hear about the Tehillim chain-call.

Ronit swishes her midnight-dark, 20-inch ponytail and nods her head, birdlike, her eyes and mind flitting between all of us. Her body quivers to a standstill with a chirpy, “Ladies … English pleeeze? What’s a Tehillim chain call?” After cocking her head to the side and absorbing a detailed explanation, the flitting resumes. “You guys would really, like, sit down and pray for a total stranger? Too awesome [midnight ponytail flick], too awesome…”

Sari, jaded Sari, adds, “Yeah, but there’s no reason to pray. Didn’t they hear the doctors’ unanimous verdict? Living in denial, that’s what they are.”