Supervising Jewish CPE students, resources and best practices

In an unprecedented development, three new Jewish supervisors were certified this week by the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE), bringing the total number of Jewish supervisors to nearly 20. As encouraging as this is, the majority of supervisors will remain Christian and many, if not most, Jewish students will train under non-Jews. It is essential, therefore, for non-Jewish supervisors to have resources and directions to help them meet the particular needs of Jewish students.

Last year -- along with my fellow ACPE supervisor, Rabbi Leah Wald -- I presented a workshop on this at the ACPE’s annual meeting. The workshop, which was extremely well received, focused on some of the issues that can cause the most unnecessary and hurtful conflict between Jewish students and their supervisors, including issues about theological differences, around eating and, especially, around how Shabbat and Jewish holidays can complicate issues of scheduling things like on-call time. While theology, for example, is generally a matter of belief in Christian contexts, for many Jews practice is our theology. Thus, the kind of theological struggles that happen when CPE students confront the disturbing theological challenges of the actual suffering and injustice patients experience may be expressed in ways non-Jewish supervisors will find surprising. Instead, of belief shifting, it might be practice that shifts. A student might, for example, become more or less Shabbat observant during a unit as he or she wrestles with the theological and spiritual challenges any good CPE program will confront them with.

To help supervisors work with issues of Jewish theology and practice, we provided two important resources:

• 1) The top 10 theological issues to be aware of with Jewish students
• 2) Guidelines for Religiously and Culturally Respectful On-Call Scheduling

This second document -- created by Leah, who heads the Department of Volunteer, Chaplaincy, and Language Services for Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia -- constitutes a best practice not just for supervising Jewish students, but for supervising all students. In short, the guidelines recommend that the supervisor clarify with all students during the interview process what religious limitations they have with regard to on-call. Then, once the program starts, the supervisor tells the peer group about the parameters that were set during admissions process, and the students themselves together are expected to set the on-call schedule within those parameters. That is, students do not have to negotiate their right to follow the time commitments of their religious tradition. But, they do have to negotiate within the parameters to arrive at an equitable schedule with their peers.

Leah has found that this approach of both requiring negotiation, but also limiting it within some set of pre-set parameters, also serves the students’ learning. It pushes students to learn about what respecting religious diversity can mean in the concrete. She found that having to address religious differences from the outset provides opportunity for students to explore more quickly and deeply issues about how key differences about faith and practice vary between faith traditions.

In the workshop, we also talked about the key -- but sometimes difficult to find -- line between a student expressing psychological resistance and a genuine religious need. This is especially important because many of the wounding experiences Jews have had in CPE happened when a supervisor was unable to recognize genuine religious need -- like a student’s need to not work on Shabbat. Working with students’ around their resistance serves their learning, but trying to actually change their religious beliefs and practices only causes hurt and wounding.

I presented a challenging encounter between two Jewish students, one an Orthodox man and the other a non-Orthodox woman. There are practices held by some Orthodox Jews -- like a man’s refusal to shake a woman’s hand -- that some women might find offensive or insulting. I suggested an approach that would allow the Orthodox man to retain his practice without being judged for it, but that also encouraged him to engage in a dialogue with those who felt hurt. This way both students could learn from each other and about how their beliefs and practices might impact others and about the diversity of spiritual practices and beliefs they might encounter in clinical settings.

I also gave a teaching on one of my favorite pieces of Talmud regarding issues of pastoral care and about the meaning, or lack thereof of suffering, the Give me your Hand story on Brachot 5b.

I am so proud of all my colleagues -- both Jewish and non-Jewish -- who have been working hard for years to provide a welcoming and safe place for Jews and other non-Christians in CPE. I am grateful to all the people who nurtured me and I hope that the work Leah and I did will be one part of continuing to make CPE a more welcoming space for Jews. And, mazel tov, again to Rabbis Maurice Applebaum, Mollie Cantor, Yael Shmilovitz on their certification!

Jewish pastoral care -- guided by sources, not theology

Being a Jew in the field of chaplaincy education is always a bit of an adventure -- the very term 'chaplain' can bring up Christian connotations in people's minds, as does the term 'pastoral care.' So, as a Jewish person, I am always trying to navigate between what I feel I can comfortably borrow from my Christian colleagues -- whose hard work and devotion to caring for the suffering have brought us the gift of an established way of thinking about how to train spiritual caregivers -- and what I must reject as being inconsistent with my Judaism. And, more importantly, what gifts do I have to bring out of my tradition to the broader field of pastoral care?

I had opportunity to think about this yesterday when I made a presentation on Midrash and Jewish pastoral care to some chaplaincy students at a hospital in Baltimore. I opened with one of my favorite quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel: "A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought."

Heschel is often described as one of the greatest Jewish theologians of the 20th century. But can a man who -- as this quote indicates -- so clearly rejected with centrality of the cognitive (of thought) really even properly be called a theologian? I remember what one of my rabbinical school teachers told us about how to properly read Heschel. Don't look for organized thoughts, he said. Heschel organized his writing around sources (Holy texts from the Bible, Talmud and elsewhere) and so to understand him, you have to read his works the same way -- by revolving around the sources.

I think you might be able to say the same thing of the whole of Judaism. Our tradition -- our way -- is not so much organized rationally around structured thoughts, as it is around sources, the holy texts that guide and instruct us. At the beginning of our summer chaplaincy program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the head of JTS' Center for Pastoral Education, Mychal Springer, gave a lecture about the nature of Jewish pastoral care (a talk that will become a book chapter soon). I noticed as she spoke that she was organizing her statements in the kind of Jewish way I described above -- she was going from holy text to holy text and talking about how that text instructs us, how it helps us to know who we are as spiritual caregivers when we stand before a suffering person.

In the field of Clinical Pastoral Education, we often ask the people training to be its educator/supervisors, "what does your theory tell you to do in this situation." I have always bristled at this question. "What theory?" I have thought. "I have no theory, I only have sources."

One thing that may be coming out of this wonderful summer of teaching pastoral care in a Jewish institution that once nurtured me so much as student is a greater confidence of embracing my "theorylessness" and my "sourcefullness." It's a genuine part of what makes me a Jewish supervisor, and not just a supervisor who happens to be Jewish.

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By the way, this way of thinking about about sources as _instructing_ us is related to some thinking I have been doing about how to define spirituality in an inclusive way that accounts for a Jewish approach. Here is an _insruction-centered_ definition of spirituality I came up with for a paper last semester (thanks to Even Senreich for helping inspire this definition):

Spirituality refers to a person’s sense that there is something larger and universal that exists beyond his or her person, and is, most importantly, a source of ultimate instruction about what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what is meaningful and what is not. This source might be other humans (as in a member of a nation deriving ultimate instruction about when it is right to kill from a sense of his or her membership in that nation), or it might be something beyond the human (eg, God). The person might be part of that source, or completely separate from it. The magnitude of a person’s spirituality – both in general and in a particular moment – is measured by the extent he or she feels instructed by his or her source when faced with the most difficult and existential questions in life.

They just don't get it (being a Jew in CPE)

The Jews have had the observance of Shabbat for well over two-thousand years now, but amazingly, the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (which, ironically, is dedicating its annual conference to multiculturalism and diversity), seems seems not to have figured this out, yet.
Tonight -- when observant Jews around the world will be dispensing with operating electrical devices and the consumption of popular media and entertainment as part of their core religious observance of Shabbat -- the association has chosen to schedule the event of most interest to Jews -- the showing of a bit of popular media about Jews.
It's a documentary film called Trembling Before God. The film is an intense examination of the struggle some observant Jews have faced with reconciling their core religious beliefs and practices with their realization that their sexual orientation is gay.
I know exactly what will happen tonight. The overwhelming Christian members of the association will be deeply touched by the film. But they'll also be confused. They won't understand some of the practices the people in the film were struggling with. They'll want to ask the Jews questions. And so they'll look around them. But the Jews won't be there (I, for example, will be celebrating Shabbat with a dear friend in North Dallas, dozens of miles away -- much too far for me to walk, even if I was willing to watch a film on Shabbat).
I wouldn't care so much if this was an isolated incident. But it's not. Next year, the association's annual conference, dubbed "Courageous Conversations: Division, Diversity and Dialogue," will probably be lacking any Jewish participants in that dialogue -- most of us will be elsewhere celebrating the holiday of Simhat Torah which falls on the first day of the conference. Even if I could get on a plane right after the holiday, I would still miss most of the conference.
And then there was the memorial service at the conference, yesterday. There are few things that feel more like a fundamentally Christian form to me than a choir. Now, admittedly, some Jews are ok with choirs, but why would experts in interfaith dialogue and learning -- like the CPE supervisors at this conference -- chose a form that is so potentially problematic? And not just for Jews. I have only been in a mosque a few times, but I can tell you that there was nothing that looked like a choir (or an organ or anything like that) in those mosques. Might a Muslim also find a choir a strange form that somehow feels Christian?
Now I want to add that I was deeply moved by parts of the memorial service (especially when Bob Cholke's name appeared on the screen). And also that I have found this conference incredibly valuable to me and that I am a big believer in CPE in general, in the ACPE in particular and in the incredibly wonderful work CPE does every day to help future clergy and other students become more sensitive to differences in people's beliefs and practices. The ACPE is most certainly an organization that is devoted to interfaith ministry in a profound way.
One of the senior supervisors at the conference listened to my story of how alienated and excluded I felt by the choir being in the memorial service and he challenged me to give him a picture of what would be more acceptable. I will respond to that challenge soon in a comprehensive way. But I want to just say a few quick things, first.
A part of the service that did work really well for me was the reading of a powerful poem by Maya Angelou called Elegy. Here are some of its lines:

I lie down in my grave
And watch my children
grow
Proud blooms
above the weeds of death.
. . . the worms, my friends,
yet tunnel holes
bones and through those
apertures I see rain.

Why was this more acceptable? One reason is something that comes out of 'CPE 101' -- the importance of using "I" language when you are dialoging with someone about intense feelings or experiences. The voice in the poem speaks of something "I" experienced. There is no use of the word "you" and all the use of that word might demand of the listener to do or feels something the speaker wants. That is, the poem did not demand that I share any belief or practice of the speaker.
So, I remain hopeful that there will be more sensitivity to the presence of non-Christians in chaplaincy. But there is much work that needs to be done.

Where are the Jews? Where are the men?

From a quick review of the ACPE web site:

• There are currently no rabbis who are candidates to be CPE supervisors (these are the people who train other chaplains, etc.).
• There are four rabbis who have made associate (which is one small step shy of being fully certified).
• But none of these four is male!
• There are five fully certified rabbi supervisors, two of whom are male and three of whom are female.

Now, granted, these numbers don't tell the whole story (there's also the CPSP and potential supervisors like myself who are earlier in their training and might make candidate in the next year or so). But, nonetheless, they are very troubling. There just aren't enough Jewish CPE supervisors to give rabbinical students and other Jews a good chance of being able to find a Jewish supervisor to train with. And how are we ever going to get enough if we don't have any Jewish candidates?

Finally, I think it's important for there to be male role models for Jewish chaplains. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single male rabbi from the Conservative Movement (my denomination) who is a CPE supervisor.

These numbers just make me more determined to follow the path I'm on!!

A stranger in a strange land

I was reflecting today on what really bothered me in the experience I described in my recent "Sour Mile" post: I think what I really wanted this chaplain in an overwhelming Christian hospital to do was to acknowledge that it would certainly indeed be a problem to have a Jewish chaplain (that is, me) in his program.

I concede that what I am saying is counterintuitive. You would think that a minority person would want to hear exactly what this guy was working hard to tell me -- which is that it would not be a problem, and that any needs I had could be accommodated.

But the problem is that I know that there is no way any such assurance could be true. Any person who has ever experienced being a minority knows that his or her minority status is a constant issue that must constantly be struggled with. The really scary thing is when somebody refuses to acknowledge the presence of that struggle. It means even harder work for you as the minority person in terms of educating the people around you -- before you can even start the difficult process of struggling with the differences, you have to first convince them that the need to struggle even exists.

For us Jews who live and work among others, it is essential never to forget that, no matter how welcome we might feel where we are, we still always indeed remain strangers. Our greatest leader -- Moses -- made a reminder of his strangerhood (living amid other people) in the most dramatic way -- he gave one of his sons a name that constituted such a reminder:

וַתֵּלֶד בֵּן, וַיִּקְרָא אֶת-שְׁמוֹ גֵּרְשֹׁם: כִּי אָמַר--גֵּר הָיִיתִי, בְּאֶרֶץ נָכְרִיָּה.

And she [Moses' wife Tziporah] gave birth to a son. And he [Moses] named him Gershom: as he [Moses] said, "at stranger I was in a strange/foreign land. [Exodus 2:22]

Again, like I said in my Sour Milk post, I appreciate the good and honest intentions of the chaplain I was talking to. But, I wanted to identify why his assurances did not fully satisfy me.

Shabbat Shalom!

Sour milk

I recently spoke with a Christian chaplain about what it might be like for a Jewish person (like myself) to work (and study) at his hospital. He kept saying things like “it’s absolutely no problem” or “we really value diversity here” or “we’ll respect any religious need you have.”

I don’t in any way mean to devalue this chaplain or to deny his sincerity and earnestness. But, basically, he just wasn’t getting it.

I take a lot of the blame for our failure to more fully communicate here. I have trouble explaining the incredible complexity of the interfaith issues a Jewish chaplain can face. Step one in making it possible for a Jewish chaplain to function in a predominantly Christian environment is the kind of simple respect this chaplain was showing to me. But, it is only the first step. The next step is learning to confront the complexity of it –- and to admit that no one will ever be able to completely accommodate my needs (and still be themselves).

Anyway, here’s my attempt to try and explain some of the complexity of this – the metaphor I use is that of “sour milk.”

Imagine you’re incredibly thirsty. And that you’re a lover of cold, fresh milk. You come across a glass, and amid your thirst you start gulping it down. It is only when it is already halfway down your throat that you start to taste it, and then you begin to realize that it’s turned disgustingly sour. You try to cough it up, but you can’t get rid of all of it, or its horrible taste.

This is the way I felt once when I was I’m listening to a prayer offered by a Christian at the beginning of what was labeled as an interfaith social justice event. I listened to what he was asking God for. And I agreed strongly with every bit of it. And I kept saying “amen to each part in my heart. I kept drinking it down.

And then he ended the prayer in the name of Jesus.

I was sick. I had been halfway to saying “amen” before I even realized what he had said. I wanted to cough up every bit of this prayer, but I couldn’t. I had said all those amens, and I couldn’t take them back.

This is not to say that I think any Christian should in any way be ashamed of their love of and faith in Jesus. This is not even to say that I don’t think that a Christian could talk about that faith –- and how it has played a role in inspiring them to become involved in fighting for social justice. But when you offer a prayer that asks everyone in the room to join you in agreeing with its sentiments, you must show great care about not including theological elements in it that will be unacceptable to some people in the room.

And there are few things more theologically unacceptable to a serious Jew than the claim that Jesus was divine. For countless generations, it has been refusal to accept Jesus as divine that has most distinctly separated Jews from Christians. It is a line we do not cross. Countless Jewish lives have been lost over this. To not uphold this distinction would be to spit on their graves. . . . . And when I drank this “sour milk” offered by this Christian, I felt as if I was spitting on their graves. Desecrating them.

If all that were involved here were asking people not to end their prayers in the name of Jesus in an interfaith setting, then the “sour milk” problem would not be so complex. But, in fact, “sour milk” issues come up almost constantly in this kind of setting.

An example: One very important thing my (Christian) supervisor has passed onto me is the idea that we (as chaplains) can only lead through service. That is, all the authority that we may have in the hospital comes from the fact that we think of ourselves as being servants to those we seek to lead. Nurses, for example, accept our efforts to inspire them to provide compassionate and spiritual care to their patients because we have showed them compassionate and spiritual care when they asked it of us. I have drunk the “milk” of this idea from my supervisor quite deeply. I have been convinced of its wisdom and truth for some time now.

But, it was only incidentally that I recently found out where in his Holy texts that my supervisor finds the teaching for this. It is in a book whose authority I most certainly do not accept. The book of Mathew in the New Testament.

There, Jesus instructs his disciples that they should lead in a way different than the kings of Rome. The rulers of Rome rule by lording it over their people/servants. But . . .

It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant,

and whoever would be first among you must be your slave;

even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life. --Mat 20:26-28

And, so, what do I do now as a Jewish person? Am I forced to reject my supervisor’s teaching (since I know I must reject the text he uses to underpin it)? Do I simply accept the teaching and say I have no need for a Scriptural basis for it? Do I look within my own Holy texts for a text that teaches the same thing?

These are complex questions. And they are questions that I face all the time. Right now I am reading an excellent book on theological reflection (The Art of Theological Reflection by Killen and De Beer; I hope to write more about it soon). I am inspired very much by what I’m reading. But it is also very much a book by Christians for Christians. It, for example, often talks about the need of a person to have ways of understanding their proper path as a Christian.

You might say that the solution for me here is easy, that I merely need to replace in my mind every occurrence of the word “Christian” with “Jewish” and every occurrence of “Christianity” with “Judaism.”

Oh, only if it were so simple. For, laced in with the universal things that the authors have written are countless occurrences of things that are specifically Christian. They’re ubiquitous and hard to see. And, so, to retain my authenticity as a Jew – and to avoid drinking any “sour milk” – I must constantly evaluate everything I have read and try and discern what of it is “fresh” and what of it is “sour”. This is hard work. Hard work that a Christian does not have to do. Hard work whose existence the chaplain I spoke to was not able to see (or that I was not able to adequately explain to him).

In any CPE program led by a Christian (as nearly all are) I would constantly have to engage in the same task – constantly examining everything I was taught and asking myself what of it arises distinctly out of that person’s Christian tradition (and would thus be unacceptable to me) and what arises from something more universal – something that is part of the universal and essential part of CPE. I need anyone I am working with to acknowledge that this hard work is a part of what I need to be able do to work with them.

And it's not just me. I have a Christian colleague from Asia who is wrestling with his own version of this -- trying to filter out what part of CPE is universal and what is irreconcilably in conflict with his non-Western culture. He, like me, is constantly searching for, and evaluating, the hard-to-see assumptions in so much of what he is being taught.

I am mightily inspired by his effort and have learned so much from watching him engage in it. This is the reason it is worth all the hard work of dealing with diversity in CPE, as uncomfortable as it can be. It teaches us so much about ourselves and about others -- and gives us invaluable insights into understanding the experiences of our patients and of our students.

It is so, so worth it.

Shabbat Shalom.

The difference between Jewish and Christian Pastoral Care

This is something that I’m often asked about. Many Jews might even say that there is no such thing as Jewish Pastoral Care (ie, that it is a completely Christian concept).

The complete answer to the question is very complex, but I think (for myself, at least!) that I now have a bit more of a 25-words-or-less kind of answer that I can offer.

I recently reread some parts of what I think is the best book on Jewish Pastoral Care, Ozarowski’s To Walk in God’s Ways. . . . I’ve never been satisfied with his definition of Jewish Pastoral care. But, on reflection, I think I have developed a comfort with something close to his definition.

It’s hard (and I know I’ve been going on for more than 25 words now, but please be patient!!) to define Jewish Pastoral Care without (as Ozarowski does) first saying something about how Christianity defines Pastoral Care. The standard Christian approach sees four functions of the pastoral caregiver:

• Healing

• Sustaining

• Guiding

• Reconciling

Jewish Pastoral Care isn’t much different, but as in many things between the two faiths, there is a real difference in emphasis (grace is a good example here; while we most certainly have a concept of grace in Judaism, it is not nearly as central to our faith as grace is in Christianity, nor does it mean exactly the same thing that Christians tend to assume it means).

So, what then are the real differences between Jewish and Christian Pastoral Care?

• Jewish Pastoral Care is more community- (and less clergy-) centered

• Jewish Pastoral Care is more presence- (and less healing-) centered.

Community – Whereas Christian Pastoral Care emanates out of the Christian Bible’s accounts of Jesus as healer, Judaism’s Pastoral Care emanates out of the (very detailed) practices of Bikur Holim (visiting the sick) and Avilut (mourning) enumerated in the Talmud and in the halakhic literature.

Jesus’ example teaches Christians that ministering to the sick and suffering is best done by a leader who has special skills in healing and who has a special connection to God. But the Jewish tradition has no such special place for a leader; all of the commands of Judaism fall just as much on a street sweeper as on a rabbi. So, too, with visiting the sick and comforting mourners – these are obligations that fall on the entire community.

That does not mean that a visit from a person’s rabbi might not have some special meaning to a sick person. But the heart of the obligation falls on the community.

Of course, in becoming more modern and more American, many of us Jews have lost some of the best that it is that comes out of our tradition. The emphasis on the community taking care of people – as opposed to clergy doing it – is one of those great things that some of us have lost.

I think the lesson that our tradition teaches us is that we (who are professional pastoral caregivers) should focus on activating the best that is in our tradition. That is, we should seek to focus our energies on activating community resources to care for people, as opposed to trying to provide all care directly. In practical terms, that could mean focusing our energies on recruiting – and training – volunteers to care for the sick and suffering.

Presence – The most central text for Jewish Pastoral Care is God visiting Avraham at the Oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18:1). The tradition understands this as God visiting a sick Avraham to comfort him in his illness. God does not here – as Jesus does in so many Christian stories – bring any special kind of healing; rather, God’s mere presence is what provides comfort. In fact, the tradition understands God’s presence here as specifically a silent presence; that is, there are deep roots in the Jewish tradition for understanding mere physical presence – without any actions or speach – as being of a comfort to a sick person.

So, bottom line, I guess I have not provided a 25-words definition of Jewish Pastoral care. And, my actual Pastoral Care theology is much more complex and detailed than what I have presented here. But, it is useful to me to be able to understand the difference between the Christian and Jewish approaches as being framed by these two areas – 1) community vs. clergy centering, and 2) presence/comfort vs. healing centering.