Evaluation as blessing (a chaplaincy education summer comes to its end)

My first job after finishing rabbinical school was teaching Talmud and Rabbinics at a Jewish high school. There were so many things that I loved about that job, but having to evaluate students -- and assign them grades -- was not one of them. In one faculty meeting, I raised the question of why we gave grades at all. I remember the head of school being somewhat impatient with my question. In retrospect, I came to understand that we assigned grades at that school because that is what our customers -- students, parents and the colleges the students would be applying to -- expected us to do.

Of course, that's not what people like to say grades are about. They like to say it's about motivation -- "why will the students do the work if we don't grade them?"

That kind of thinking strikes me as being about a fundamental misunderstanding of what learning is really about and of what a person really needs to prepare his or her self for true success in the world. What the student needs most of all is to develop a love of learning and a basic curiosity about the world. In a world where the demands of jobs are changing and an ever-increasing rate, to be prepared students need to have learned how to learn. And, most importantly, they need to develop the values, independence and self-confidence needed to evaluate for themselves what is best for themselves and what success really means to them.

Grades serve none of these goals. Grades foster dependence. They stunt students' personal growth by encouraging them to look to others to tell them what is right for them and what success looks like. They are just very poor preparation for what students will face in the real world. In the work force, very few people are assigned grades. To be successful, we need to develop skills in evaluating our own work for ourselves in ways that will allow us to identify goals that will help us to continuously improve and grow. And we need to develop skill at identifying our accomplishments and articulating them to ourselves and to others.

All this is true for high schoolers, but it becomes more true for people seeking professional graduate education. And it is even more true than that for clergy and others in ministry. Most of the work for people like us is done without peers or supervisors present. Feedback from congregants tends to consist of only of the extremes of "great job, rabbi" or "I just don't like your sermons; maybe we should replace you with someone younger and cheaper."

So, a few weeks back, as we came to the end of our intense 11-week program of chaplaincy education for our four Christian seminary students and our one ordained Catholic Priest, I was left to wonder why am I writing these people evaluations?

In those final weeks, I started to realize how much anxiety some of my students were having about this. At first, I thought this was silly, but then I realized that they really did have something to worry about -- my evaluation would be read back at their seminary and could affect their progress towards ordination. This made me feel very cautious. Back in the high school, I could be fairly sure about how colleges would interpret the "A's" and "B's" I assigned. But, in the fairly arcane world of denominational ordination processes, I had no way of knowing how my words would be interpreted.

I also in those final weeks started to feel the pull from my students for affirmation. One student kept asking me, "are you going to miss us?"

It is natural to want to respond to such a request for affirmation. Who wouldn't you want to tell everybody else that they are wonderful and get back the gratitude for saying that?

But I didn't want to succumb to that temptation. I wanted to give my students something more than just affirmation. I wanted to give them a blessing.

What is a blessing? One model we have from scripture is the Priestly Blessing in the 6th chapter Book of Numbers where Aaron and other priests ask for God's blessing for the people. That is, the priests are there seeking to summon the Holy for the people before them and to connect the Holy with the people's well-being and success.

כד יְבָרֶכְךָ ה', וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ. כה יָאֵר ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ. כו יִשָּׂא ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם. כז וְשָׂמוּ אֶת-שְׁמִי, עַל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל; וַאֲנִי, אֲבָרְכֵם.

May HaShem bless you, and may He keep you.
May HaShem shine His face upon you, and extend grace unto you.
May HaShem lift His face upon you, and may He give you peace.
[In this way, they will put My name upon the people Israel, and I will bless them.]

This is a core part of what I think the blessing -- especially the blessing of the student at the end of a program in the form of the evaluation the supervisor writes -- should be for the supervisor in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE): We are summoning of the holy for the person and wishing for their success in partnership with the holy.

The important thing to realize about this is that this kind of summoning of the holy has to be something that is much more than the "feel-good" kind of "instant gratification" that would be giving the student the simple affirmation they may crave.

What I'm starting to understand is that what blessing really should be about is honoring the very place that has the most potential to access holiness in relationships -- that precious space "in-between" that is can be created by the interaction. There are many names for this space in-between. Levinas, for example, calls it the trace, "a memory of being-in-general, of the infinite".

So, the blessing that comes in an evaluation should be about honoring the interaction -- honoring what happened in the conversation between the supervisor and student about the student's work on the hospital floors. This interaction -- when it functions at its best -- is one where the two together tried to better discern the student's true path towards serving God by together examining the student's effort to serve people in pain (and bring something of the holy to them).

Honoring it means recording it. Recording it with love and care. . . . . Here I feel a need to make a digression and just say how affirming this summer was for me about the process of CPE, especially the potential for CPE to bring to light for a person the most important spiritual and personal growth issues that are before them. That may sound like the task of psychotherapist -- and it certainly is. But it seems to me that the psychotherapist is almost crippled next to the CPE supervisor. They psychotherapist only gets to see the client in the "closed container" that is the therapist's office. But a CPE supervisor like myself gets to interact with the student both in the "closed container" of weekly individual supervision and in the open container of the work setting -- a work setting (the setting of caring for people amid suffering and death) that naturally brings to the fore the issues of ultimate importance to a student. What an incredible opportunity to get to know something that is the essence of another human being. Holy work indeed!

So, what is honored and recorded as part of this process of evaluating/blessing the student is what has hopefully indeed turned out to be a holy interaction where something of the true essence of the student came to light. Where the supervisor was able to hold up that essence (I see an image of a ball of fire burning amid two upraised hands) and, for a moment, look at it together with the student. Where the two together can name what is true about it. Where the two together can wish and hope for the place where it can burn best.

What a gift to be truly seen, to feel truly seen. That is the blessing that I hope I gave my students in their evaluation. Only they can say whether they indeed received such a blessing. But that is the the number one way that I hope my written evaulations were a blessing for them -- in that they felt truly seen, seen in a loving way.

I also hope that I have given them a record of what they accomplished in those 11 weeks -- and each one of them accomplished quite a great deal. I hope what I wrote is something they will be able to look back on in the weeks, months and years to come and see something they can be proud of -- to know that they did something really important (even though they got no grade for it).

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One danger of this approach -- as some have warned me -- is that I will set expectations for myself and my students that are too high (and thus set us up for failure). What happens, for example, if I have a student who I really don't like or -- worse -- who I think is dangerous to the people he or she ministers to? How can I bless that student? I haven't faced that kind of serious challenge, yet, in my work. . . . Although I don't always feel that I have to like my students. But what is absolutely necessary is that I can find compassion for them . . . And through that compassion find a way to truly care about their learning and growth.

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There are also some practical matters about how I do evaluations -- rules that have been passed down to me by my own supervisor -- that help serve the goal of the student being able to experience his or her evaluation as a blessing. The number one rule is that there should be no suprises -- there should be nothing in the written evaluation that was not previously discussed with the student.

When this works, the student will finish reading the evaluation and then look at the supervisor -- as one of my students did -- and say "that's pretty much what happened." That is -- when the relationship between supervisor and student has worked as it should -- there is a congruence between how the supervisor and student understand what happened. The evaluation should reflect that congruence.

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One thing that I think would have suprised the "before-CPE" me is how much I use explicit God talk in these evaluations. I often talk -- especially in the final sentences -- about the student's relationship with God and how they do, or do not, understand themselves as loved by God. . . . I think this is a very important thing for most spiritual caregivers. The ministry that we bring to our patients and othes very often is just that -- to urge the person to feel God's love despite their suffering. This is not something that we can do if we do not ourselves feel God's love. . . That may be the greatest long-term challenge for the person seeking to make a life in spiritual caregiving. . . . And it is why spiritual self-care -- as I have written so often on this blog -- is so important.
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Blessing others is something that seems to have a much stronger tradition in Christianity than Judaism and many Christians expect their clergy to bless them. In Judaism the traditions and models for giving another a blessing are less clear. In terms of the Torah, we have the Priestly Blessing I mentioned above. We also have the example of Issac and Jacob giving blessing to their sons. In terms of modern practice, the strongest tradition is the weekly blessing of the children (which makes use of Jacob's blessing). There is also a strong tradition of Hasidic rebbes giving blessing to their adherents, but that tradition is rather foreign to me and my practice. This practice is something Jewish Renewal movement leader Zalman Schachter-Shalomi wrote about in his main academic work, Spiritual Intimacy: A Study of Counseling in Hasidism .

Letting nurses know that by them we are blessed

Sunday May 6 begins National Nurses Week. One thing that many hospitals -- including ours -- do to honor nurses is to send our chaplains out onto the floors to do a "Blessing of the Hands" ceremony. This can -- as it does for us -- just involve words (saying a prayer/blessing for the nurses). But some hospitals take it a step further and do a ceremony that includes anointing nurses' hands with oil.

Judaism, however, has had no tradition of anointing since the time of the Bible. Therefore, Jewish chaplains can find the demand that they participate in an anointing ceremony to be a troubling crossing of interfaith boundaries. This led, last year, to a very interesting discussion on the National Association of Jewish Chaplains mailing list.

Some Jewish chaplains shared that they would refuse to do any such a ritual as well. Others shared that they had come up with a more Jewish version of such a ritual -- a hand washing ceremony (based on the Levites washing the hands of the Cohanim/Priests, something for which there is substantial support in the Jewish tradition).

This led me to do some thinking about what the nature of blessing is in Judaism. Can we bless things? Can we bless people? Can we bless parts of people's bodies? What are we really saying when we do these things?

The Jewish way of answering such a question is to look to our ancient texts and traditions for guidance. The most prominent example of people blessing other people in our tradition comes from the 6th chapter of the book of B-Midbar (Numbers, verses 24-26). It is the priestly blessing (בירכת כוהנים/birkat kohanim) which God tells Moses to instruct Aharon and the other priests to use to bless the people Israel. It is a blessing that has been anything but buried in the Jewish tradition -- it is featured prominently in the regular prayer liturgy and is part of the traditional blessing parents say to their children:

כד יְבָרֶכְךָ ה', וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ.
כה יָאֵר ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ.
כו יִשָּׂא ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם.
כז וְשָׂמוּ אֶת-שְׁמִי, עַל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל; וַאֲנִי, אֲבָרְכֵם.

May HaShem bless you, and may He keep you.
May HaShem shine His face upon you, and extend grace unto you.
May HaShem lift His face upon you, and may He give you peace.
[In this way, they will put My name upon the people Israel, and I will bless them.]

The last line (the one I put in brackets because it is not part of the blessing proper) makes one thing quite clear -- the actual source of the blessing is not the priests who offer it; the blessing itself comes only from God. The priests are merely requesting that God carry out this blessing for the people.

If we are to take birkat kohanim as our model, then, any blessing of a person should actually be a request to God to bless that person (and his or her works) -- something along the lines of, May God (or we could substitute a nice name for God like 'The True Source of all healing') please bless these hands, so that they may bring true comfort and healing to others. Keep their work in Your sight, Lord, and guide them on their proper path.

I think the original author of the prayer that is now most commonly used in the Blessing of the Hands nurses week ceremonies had a similar sentiment about the nature of blessings. Her name is Diann Neu, and she is a Catholic feminist liturgist and psychotherapist. When I wrote her last year, I shared with her a copy of her original prayer (which was not written with nurses specifically in mind) with her. She pointedly let me know that the text had been changed from her original in one important aspect:

THE ORIGINAL BLESSING OF THE HANDS PRAYER
(not specifically written for nurses)

The text I found

The author's actual original

Blessed be the work of my hands. Blessed be these hands that have touched life. Blessed be these hands that have nurtured creativity. Blessed be these hands that have held pain. Blessed be these hands that have embraced passion. Blessed be these hands that have tended gardens. Blessed be these hands that have closed in anger. Blessed be these hands that have planted new seeds. Blessed be these hands that have cleaned, washed, mopped, scrubbed. Blessed be these hands that are wrinkled and scarred from doing justice. Blessed be these hands that have reached out and have been received. Blessed be these hands that hold the promise of the future. Blessed be the work of my hands.

Blessed be the work of your hands, O Holy One. same same same same same same same same same same same Blessed be the work of your hands, O Holy One.

That is, there is a clear recognition by the author of the original of who the real owner (God) of those healing hands is.

My guess is that people changed the original in an attempt to make the prayer palatable to people who don't believe in God (or in one God). I must admit that, as a chaplain, I feel stuck trying to come up with prayers that are both consistent with my core beliefs and that would be palatable to someone who doesn't have a God belief. (This, by the way, is not a barrier to me ministering to such a patient -- I don't need to pray with or for someone to show them caring.)

But, it is neither of the above prayers that we use in nurses week. The blessing most commonly used is an adaptation of Neu's orginal that a CPE Resident made (in Chicago, I believe):

Nurses' Hands

Blessed be these hands that have touched life.
Blessed be these hands that have felt pain.
Blessed be these hands that have embraced with compassion.
Blessed be these hands that have been clinched with anger or withdrawn in fear.
Blessed be these hands that have drawn blood and administered medicine.
Blessed be these hands that have cleaned beds and disposed of wastes.
Blessed be these hands that have anointed the sick and offered blessings.
Blessed be these hands that grow stiff with age.
Blessed be these hands that have comforted the dying and held the dead.
Blessed be these hands, we hold the future in these hands.
Blessed be our hands for they are the work of Your hands, O Holy One.

Note that the last line of this version includes an acknowledgment of the ultimate source of the hands being blessed. I nonetheless am not entirely comfortable with this text as it does not make any reference to the Creator until the last line.

A modification that I think would bring it closer to the Jewish tradition would be something like this:

Blessed are Your, Lord/HaShem our God the creator of hands that touch life . . . ..

Last year, one Jewish chaplain shared with me prayers he created that he was more comfortable with. I like both of them more, as they answer my core concerns. (Both, by the way, were meant to be used with a handwashing ceremony, which is why the language of "lifting hands" (נטילת ידיים/nitilat yidayim) is used). The first is meant to be specifically Jewish:

Praised are You, Eternal G!d, Sovereign of the universe,
who hallows us through mitzvot, and commands us
to lift our hands.

The second is meant to be more suitable for all:

Praised are You the eternal source of all
who enables us to lift our hands
that we may continue
to do our work
day after day.

In the course of the discussion, one Jewish chaplain suggested the use of Psalm 90:17, another suggestion that I like and I think is firmly rooted in our tradition (especially as we recite it traditionally before performing some mitzvot).

יז וִיהִי, נֹעַם אֲדֹנָי אֱלֹהֵינוּ-- עָלֵינוּ:
וּמַעֲשֵׂה יָדֵינוּ, כּוֹנְנָה עָלֵינוּ; וּמַעֲשֵׂה יָדֵינוּ, כּוֹנְנֵהוּ.

May the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
And the labors of our hands, uphold them for us.
The labors of our hands, uphold them!

[A perhaps nicer translation might be, May the pleasantness of my Lord, our God, be upon us -- may He establish our handiwork for us; our handiwork may He establish.]

In conclusion, I would endeavor to avoid any kind of ceremony that looks anything like anointing; it's just not consistent with the Jewish tradition. Handwashing, to me, looks a lot like anointing, especially if it is a matter of one person washing _another_ person's hands. The only place I know of that in the tradition is the Levites washing the priests. Are we saying that nurses are like priests when we do this? I know there are some other places washing has come into the modern tradition (some people wash a female child's feet at a baby naming ceremony), but that strikes me as a place where a lack of a ritual (that is, an equivalent to the drama and power of circumcision for a boy) was especially glaring (which really is not the case with nurses hands!).

As far as prayers, I could imagine a number of options, including some use of Psalm 90 and/or an adaptation of the two prayers the other Jewish chaplain used.

But I also think I can live with the "Nurse's Hands" adaptation of Neu's prayers. I think the key for me would be to add an impromptu introduction I would give just myself (out loud to the group) before asking everyone to say the written text together. The introduction would make clear: a) that the prayer we are about to say together is addressed to God, and b) that we are saying it to ask for God's blessing to be upon us (and the work of our hands). Then we could recite the text of the Nurse's Hands prayer together.

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By the way, when I wrote Neu last year, here is how she responded to my asking her if she was pleased about the adaptation of her original prayer:

I am pleased to see that my blessing is meeting the needs of the nurses. I see myself as a healer and feel strongly that healers need to be blessed for the work that we do.

And I was fascinated by what she shared about how she came up with the original prayer:

I was teaching a liturgy course and gave my students (Christian and Jewish) the assignment: take a symbol and write a blessing. I do the same assignments that I ask my students to do. So, about one hour before the class convened, I started to do the assigment. I searched for a symbol. Looked at my hands. Wrote the blessing.