Filling the gaps -- the essence of Midrash

A couple of quotes from Daniel Boyarin on the nature of Midrash:

The text of the Torah is gapped and dialogical, and into the gaps the reader slips, interpreting and completing the text in accordance with the codes of his or her culture. . . . Midrash is a portrayal of the reality which the rabbis perceived in the Bible through their ideologically colored eyeglasses.

What I like about these quotes (from pg. 14-15 of his seminal Intertextuality and the reading of Midrash) -- despite the fact that they're just plain wonderfully clear! -- is that it opens the way towards an understanding of Midrash that can span both the ancient product of our rabbis and today's efforts to create contemporary Midrash. It puts the text of the Torah at its center and characterizes an important key aspect of that text that has shaped the way the Jews have related to their Holy texts through the millennia -- by charging into the 'gaps' to (incredibly!) both preserve the integrity of the ancient words, while also infusing them with free and contemporary meaning.

I am grateful to have been assigned to again read these words of Boyarin. One of the great gifts of this semester of my doctoral work is that I am privileged to study with two of the greatest contemporary readers of ancient Jewish texts -- Jeffrey Rubenstein and Elliot Wolfson. I'm enjoying it!

"What critically ill person needs above all is to be understood"

That was the line that jumped out at me when I was listening tonight to Fresh Air's Terry Gross read from Anatole Broyard's book Intoxicated by my illness. I transcribed the whole quote (see below), which strikes me as a particularly powerful and succinct expression of how the visitor with the best of intentions can actually alienate an ill person. And the quote also states wonderfully what it is that an ill person often actually needs. Here's the whole quote (which Broyard wrote about his experience with terminal prostate cancer):

All my friends are wits, but now that I'm sick I'm treated to the spectacle of watching them wear different faces. They come to see me and instead of being ironical and making jokes, they're terribly serious. They look at me with a kind of grotesque lovingness in their faces. They touch me, they feel my pulse almost. They're trying to give me strength and I'm trying to shove it off. The dying man has to decide how tactful he wants to be. What a critically ill person needs above all is to be understood.

I intend to get this book. It sounds like will be an excellent part of literature readings for CPE students, especially after reading the very positive annotation it was given at the Litmed database.

The interview, by the way, was actually with Broyard's daughter, Bliss Broyard, and comes from the 9/27/07 podcast (at about 18:50).

Getting out of the way (and the illness narratives)

One of the first things we try and teach our new chaplains is not to say, "I understand exactly what you are saying, let me tell you when the same thing happened to me . . ." and then going on to tell the patient their own story.

Students really have trouble understanding this -- "don't we want to establish common ground with our patients," they ask? "Doesn't this establish rapport?"

The problem is that we're jumping to conclusions when we do this. We're assuming we understand what the patient is going through before we even have the slightest conception of his or her experience. We're taking the focus off the patient and putting it on us. We're telling our story by preventing the patients from telling theirs.

My supervisor shared with me an excellent short article by a San Francisco doctor that explains this problem wonderfully by talking about the "Illness Narratives". The Illness Narratives (Restitution, Chaos and Quest) were described by sociologist Arthur W. Frank (see his The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics; for a brief, but excellent, description of these three narratives, see the short article, above).

The author of the article takes a great quote from Frank's book that well describes much of my understanding of how pastoral care can heal:

"Serious illness is a loss of the destination and map that had previously guided the ill person's life: ill people have to learn to think differently. They learn by hearing themselves tell their stories, absorbing others' reactions and experiencing their stories being shared".

This is what we try and train our student chaplains to do instead of sharing their own stories with patients -- inquire into the patient's experience. Get out of the way and let them to tell their story. Don't try and fix their problem. Instead, try and understand their experience. . . and open the door for the suffering person to take the next step: the step to the learning and self-transformation that has the potential to make them into a person who has regained control over their life, even if they have tragically lost any control over what their body is doing.

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By the way: Speaking of people who miss the patient's story by telling their own (in a ill-conceived effort to establish rapport), the Archives of Internal Medicine recently published a study saying many doctors are doing just that. The New York Times headlined its story about the study: Study Says Chatty Doctors Forget Patients

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The truth is always more heroic than the hype

Those words were spoken today on Capitol Hill by former Army private Jessica Lynch.

Sometimes it might seem too obvious to bother to state that lying is a bad thing. But, actually we need reminding all the time. The temptation to tell lies -- especially when we convince ourselves that it is actually in the best interest of the person we are lying to or about -- is sometimes overwhelming. We even have a phrase for doing this -- telling "white lies". Especially when people are sick, or in the hospital, we are tempted to lie to them -- to tell them they are sure to get better when we know they probably will not. We convince ourselves that we are serving them when we do that.

But the story told by Ms. Lynch and by the family of Army Ranger and former football star Pat Tillman should remind us of how painful lies can be.

It would be easy to convince ourselves that the military's lies about Lynch were in her best interest. After all, who wouldn't want to be hailed as a brave, gun-toting hero, as she was? Why would anyone want people to know that the truth is that you let your gun barrel get jammed with sand and that you endured sexual assault at the hands of your enemies?

Lynch bravely answered, today: "The truth is always more heroic than the hype," she said. "The American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don't need to be told elaborate lies," she also said. "I had the good fortune to come home and to tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, did not have that opportunity."

Tillman, of course, was killed by "friendly fire" (that is, accidentally by his fellow soldiers) and not by the enemy as the military had long contended. HIs family testified as to how deeply wounded they were to realize that the military they had trusted and whom their loved one had served so bravely and faithfully had broken their faith with them by deceiving them about TIllman's death.

May it be the will of the Blessed Holy One that we find the strength to tell the truth even in the times when it is hardest and to keep our faith with those who trust us and count on us.

More Vonnegut

Here are some quotes that are coming to mind, today:

From Mother Night (which I think is, ultimately, my favorite of his novels):

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

I also like the quote the Times obit lifted from “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

I think it must be hard for somebody who picks up Vonnegut's books for the first time, today, to really appreciate what they are about; much of their meaning came from contrasting what was within them with what was happening in the world around during the 1960s and early 70s. The Times article does a nice job of giving a sense of how the times in which Vonnegut wrote gave deep meaning (even political meaning) to a seemingly casual, throwaway phrase like "so it goes":

[“Slaughterhouse-Five,”] featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.