Relighting the fires -- next week at Oraita

On Sunday I will be making the long drive to Northwood, NH, to take part in an exciting new program from Art Green and the other folks at Boston's Hebrew College, which has made a mark in recent years as one of the most dynamic institutions for educating Jewish leaders.

The program is called Oraita, which is the Aramaic word for Torah. But the word means more for me here: with the flames rising from the Alephs on either side of the logo above -- along with the sound "or" at the beginning of the word Oraita -- I very much think of the Hebrew word or, which means a light or a candle flame. And it is for flame that I am heading out to the New Hampshire woods for a week.

I, and the 15 other rabbis who will be there from across America, are coming in search of the flame that we know is in Torah, the flame that we need to light our heart and our spirits. The flame that is best found from studying together in pairs and in groups in the room we Jews like to call the Beit Midrash, or The House of Inquiry. In that place we can find like-minded souls and minds to inquire after the flame, together.

For us rabbis who are "out in the field" this kind of community can be very difficult to find close to our homes. And that is why a place like Oraita is so important. Our communities count on us -- us rabbis -- to help them light the flames in their own souls and to help them connect with their passion for Judaism and for the Jewish people. But if our own flames are not burning -- if we have not done the "self-care" necessary to keep our own spirit fires alit, we will have nothing to give our communities. And, so we go to places like Oraita not just for ourselves, but for our communities and for the Jewish people as a whole.

But, for me, Oraita is not just any retreat. For me it will be -- God willing -- the culmination of a long-held dream: the dream to study with Arthur Green. I have admired him -- and the great minds he gathers around him -- for many years, but have only had a chance to hear him speak once. Green is one of those rare folks (Dani Matt is another) who are able to bridge the worlds of 1) academic excellence and 2) spiritual inspiration. The project of bridging those worlds is one that is particularly important to me. One way I think of that now is to say that who I really want to be becoming is both a "Talmud Scholar and Spiritual Healer". Put another way, I want to live up to the words that my colleague and dear friend Rabbi Shawn Simon spoke about me when he introduced me at my ordination a little more than three years ago:

[I]n the book of Jeremiah we learn that the voice of the Lord is like a hammer shattering stone. In Talmud Sanhedrin this verse is explicated: Just as the hammer splits rock into many shards so too one biblical verse can project multiple meanings. Take the verse –split it, carve it, shape it – this is the rabbinic enterprise. Bamidbar Rabba idealizes a student who successfully derives 49 meanings from each verse studied. This Midrash concludes that the student himself is a chip off of Mt. Sinai. From this we learn that it is not an object we received but rather a process. In essence, what was received at Sinai was the obligation to constantly study text.

Tonight I am presenting someone who embodies this ideal. My own studies greatly profited from having learned with Alan in hevruta. Our sessions always distinguished themselves by being both intellectually vibrant and passionately religious. His approach posits that text study: is both a critical source of knowledge for personal and communal development and our most reliable interface with God.

Who could ask for more than a Hevruta who envisioned each and every session of our studying as an opportunity to renew the Sinai experience!

It is my prayer that it will be the will of the Blessed Holy One that I should have the privilege of having the flames of Torah kindled brighter in my heart and soul as I learn with my colleagues and blessed teachers at Oraita. And that this learning will move me closer to upholding the promise of the above words about me.

__________________________

It is, by the way, an important time for me to focus on the part of me that is about finding inspiration in Torah study. The last month and a half or so has been an intense and exciting time for me in my work (and the intensity of that has been one reason I have not posted here much, the other being that with so many Jewish holidays over the last month there were many less days available to me when I was permitted to write).

The excitement has been about our chaplaincy students here at the hospital. We have four full-time residents who started at the beginning of September and four part-time interns who we started orienting in the middle of September. My passion for the work of spiritual care -- and for assisting others in taking this work upon themselves and building their skills at it -- has been alit by my interactions with these students, and that flame has been burning bright, oh so bright, for me over the recent weeks and days. It's been a great time, but caring for myself and my ministry means maintaining a balance. And so I'm off to the woods of New Hampshire! :)

Soulless reviews of soulful psalms (translations)

Recently, I recommended Robert Alter's new translation of the Psalms (and especially an NPR interview with Alter, himself). Now, I'd like to recommend the New Yorker's review of Alter's book.

Actually -- in the 'great' tradition of New Yorker writers getting intoxicated by their own words and thoughts -- it's not really a review of Alter's work. It's more of an essay by the author -- novelist and literary critic James Woods -- about what he thinks about the Psalms. Luckily, what he thinks is very much worth reading. His article is a wonderful, short summary of some of the most important points about what gives the Psalms such incredible power and beauty even now, thousands of years after they were written. And Woods wonderfully states why the Psalms can be so relevant for us today as we sometimes struggle to maintain the strength of our faith in a world whose ubiquitous violence and suffering can test us dearly:

This struggle [presented in the Psalms] between faith and doubt, hope and despair, is undoubtedly one of the features that have made the Psalms such a help to so many readers and writers, both believers and nonbelievers.

A word of caution, however (and this is why I used the word "soulless" in the title of this post): Woods, like so many intellectuals, feels a need to say that while the Psalms are interesting to, in effect, gaze upon (like an ancient piece of art in a glass museum case), he does not think they actually have any relevance to our lives. He says, for example:

Psalm 90, like many others, belongs to a theological landscape quite remote from our own.

He says this is so because "with our new, borderless knowledge of the cosmos" we can no longer relate to "what the Biblical scholar James Kugel refers to as the 'starkness' of the Hebrew Bible, a bare, hard world in which a desert landscape of rocks and rare streams is briefly lit up by columns of fire."

Oh, Mr. Woods, come and stand beside me in the hospital some day. Come and stand beside me as I talk to a cancer patient facing death or the possibility of death. That place can indeed be a desert landscape, one full of the despair and desperate pleading that we find in the words of the Psalms. But -- and this is part of what makes chaplaincy work with cancer patients such an amazing experience -- it is exactly this kind of place that has the incredible potential to be suddenly lit up by "columns of fire", columns of fire that represent the presence of God becoming manifest in the suffering person's life. It is an amazing thing to be a part of.

But, if you read Woods' review with a grain of salt, you can really learn a lot by reading his fine article. I recommend it!

A Harry Potter Yizkor

I'm a bit of a latecomer to the Harry Potter craze, but, after reading the final book, it's clear to me that these are much more than mere children's stories. The whole series -- especially the final book -- engages some of the most most profound themes in our lives, and many of these themes are the same ones that are central to our holiest of holidays, Yom Kippur, which starts at sundown tomorrow: themes that involve confronting our own mortality, confronting the possibility that we may not be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year. Standing on the precipice of death that the fast and liturgy of Yom Kippur brings us to we are forced to ask ourselves what it is that really matters to us in our lives. Who and what matters to us most. What we really want to be doing with our lives. And what is the potential for teshuvah -- of a change in the direction of our lives.

The memorial service on Yom Kippur that we call yizkor is one of our ways of marking what matters most to us. We remember then the ones who have passed from this life who mattered to us most. Who we miss the most. Who we owe the most.

I would not be giving anything away about how the final Potter book concludes to say that there is a key scene in there where the now fully grown, bespeckled wizard recalls the people who have mattered to him most in a most intense and vivid way. He asks those now-dead people to walk beside him for a bit. He asks them to give him strength and courage amidst the greatest of his many tests. He asks them for forgiveness for the ways he has hurt them. And he tells them all they have meant to him.

If you participate in yizkor this Yom Kippur, may it be the will of the Blessed Holy One that your loved ones will come clear and vivid into your mind. May you find forgiveness and give forgiveness. And may their memory be a blessing unto you and a source of strength.

Tzom Kal/צום קל, an easy fast. #*#

Soulless psychiatrists?

According to this Times article, the divide between psychiatry and religion is alive and well.

I suppose it's true, but I think it's a sign of how I've grown in my path towards pursuing certification as a chaplaincy supervisor that it now strikes me as strange to think of the two as being in conflict. Both are a way of trying to understand the true essence of existence and the human place in the universe. I use the insights of both every day in my work.

clipped from www.nytimes.com September 18, 2007 Vital Signs Insights: Two Paths: Religion and Psychiatry By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Of all medical specialties, psychiatrists are the least religious, a survey has found, and the most religious doctors are the least likely to refer their patients to psychiatrists. Although psychiatrists were just as likely as other physicians to report that religious beliefs influenced their practice — about half said it did — just 29 percent of psychiatrists, compared with 47 percent of other doctors, said they attended religious services more than once a month. When asked whether they described themselves as religious or spiritual, 42 percent of psychiatrists and 53 percent of other doctors said they did. About a third of psychiatrists, but almost half of other physicians, said they “look to God for strength, support, and guidance.” Psychiatrists were significantly less likely to be Protestant or Catholic and more likely to be Jewish or have no religious affiliation.

Soulless Psalms?

Actually Robert Alter's new translation of the greatest prayerbook ever written has plenty of soul in it (even if he avoids the word, itself). Alter is one of those rare top-notch academic scholars who also has a real commitment to finding the place where spiritual meaning and intellectual rigor meet. He's not my favorite Bible translator (that honor goes to Everett Fox), but he's way up there. This NPR interview is definitely worth a listen.

clipped from www.npr.org Author Explores the Psalms, Sans Soul All Things Considered, September 17, 2007 · For thousands of years, the Psalms have been a powerful part of first Jewish, and then Christian liturgy. In translation, they contain some of the most memorable lines ever written in English. Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California Berkeley, has published a new translation of the Psalms, The Book of Psalms. Among the most noteworthy absences from his version is the soul. Why Psalms with no soul and no salvation? Robert Alter tells Robert Siegel that those are concepts superimposed on the ancient poems in more recent times. Alter's previous works include the biblical translations Genesis and The Five Books of Moses.

Exercising the "hope muscle" -- the foundation of faith

At about 5 p.m. on Monday last week you would have found me sprawled out on the grass next to the side of the road in Far Hills, NJ. I felt utterly spent after nearly two full days of riding my bicycle up and down the hills of the Delaware and Raritan river valleys. A cloud of despair began to pass over me. I couldn't imagine pedaling the 25 miles yet to go towards my planned final destination for the night. And, yet, 20 minutes later I was back on the bike diligently climbing the hill before me and a few hours later I made it (albeit in the darkness) to my goal.

This is one of the things I love most about bicycle riding -- the cycles it takes me on between despair and, often, elation, especially the elation that comes from reaching the top of one of those terrible hills on a hot day and then to be suddenly and effortlessly flying fast downhill with the roar of the wind in my ears. In effect, bicycling trains me in the process of regaining hope. It helps me exercise the muscle that we use within ourselves to restore ourselves to hope.

And we need that muscle to help us restore ourselves to hope and faith. For a life of faith -- contrary to what the popular culture might say -- is not one of uninterrupted joy and untested confidence. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes:

Since faith is a response to the Presence [of God] in life and history, this response ebbs and flows. The difference between the skeptic and the believer is frequency of faith, and not the certitude of position.
--Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, The Shoah and the legacy of anti-Semitism in Christianity in Jewish Terms (p. 27).

To maintain ourselves as believers we need to find ways to exercise our hope muscle so that it can become strong and can regularly pull us out of the despair into which we inevitably will fall. Hope, of course -- and the restoration of hope -- is a central part of Judaism and of the holiday of Rosh HaShannah that begins tomorrow evening. The Psalm we associate with these high holidays is Psalm 27, which concludes with a call for us to find hope:

קַוֵּה, אֶל-יְהוָה: .
Hope for the Lord.

חֲזַק, וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ;
Be strong and He will make courageous your heart.

וְקַוֵּה, אֶל-יְהוָה
Hope for the Lord.

The Psalm is not at all subtle in its statement of where this hope can come from -- it opens with these famous words of trust and hope:

יְהוָה, אוֹרִי וְיִשְׁעִי
The Lord is my light and my salvation.

--מִמִּי אִירָא;
From whom would I fear?

יְהוָה מָעוֹז-חַיַּי,
The Lord is the stronghold of my life.

מִמִּי אֶפְחָד.
From whom would I be afraid?

These words are indeed an inspiring statement of trust, a picture of unbreakable faith. And, yet, a few lines later in the Psalm we find the author desperately begging and pleading. Pleading, in particular, that God would not abandon him:

שְׁמַע-יְהוָה קוֹלִי אֶקְרָא; וְחָנֵּנִי וַעֲנֵנִי.
Hear, Lord, my voice -- I call out! -- and be gracious to me and answer me.

.....
.אֶת-פָּנֶיךָ יְהוָה אֲבַקֵּשׁ.
. . . Your Presence (literally, "face"), Lord, I seek.

אַל-תַּסְתֵּר פָּנֶיךָ, מִמֶּנִּי--
Do not hide Your Face from me.

אַל תַּט-בְּאַף, עַבְדֶּךָ:
Do not turn Your servant away in anger.
--verses 7-9

This, then, is the great message of the Psalm: if you are to achieve the trusting faith of its opening lines, you also must be willing to fearlessly contemplate the loss of that faith -- to contemplate the possiblity that God may abandon you. And you must humble yourself and beg God. You must plead. You must beg as the Pslam's author did. This is the truest way to exercise the hope muscle. This is the way to restore yourself.

May it be the will of the blessed Holy one that you shall have the sweetest of year's ahead. And may you find the strength in your heart to be able to stand before God in humility and with repentance in your heart. And may you find hope. True hope.

Shannah Tova/שנה טובה

Chaplaincy makes the Times -- as carrying out a Holy book purge!

Whatever the merits might or might not be of the program described in this front-page New York Times story, it pains me that the first sentence of the story describes chaplains as carrying out a "purge" (of Holy books on the request of federal prison officials).

Being described as "purgers" does not reflect well on the profession.

It seems to me also that this case raises an issue that chaplains face in any setting -- whose interests do we represent? Do we represent the interests of the staff members we see and work with every day? Or, do we represent the interests of the patients (whom we may only see once)? It's easy to say we want to do both, but what happens when these interests are in conflict? And if we do choose to represent the interest of officials (over patients or prisonsers) does that mean we lose the credibility we need in order to get folks to trust us enough to let us into their lives to minister to them?

I first wrote about this in July here.

clipped from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/us/10prison.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups. Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. September 10, 2007

Using great literature to teach pastoral care

While I was on my bicycle trip this week, I was pleased to see that Plainviews, the online journal for spiritual care providers, published a short article of mine. Here's the beginning of it:

Theology leaves the dusty tomes of libraries and comes to life when chaplains go out onto the floors of a hospital. The "big questions" – What is life? What is death? Why do the good suffer? – wait behind every corner for us to uncover.

But as those of us who supervise clinical pastoral education (CPE) students know, theological issues do not always leap quickly off the page from the verbatims and other clinical material students bring. There are two problems here: 1) the encounters recounted in the clinical material may not be theologically rich to start with, and 2) students' ability to reflect theologically – to be able to see deep spiritual issues in the concerns patients have – may not yet be well developed.

To address both these issues, it can be helpful to supplement students' clinical material with other sources that are already both full of the "big questions" and that already have some reflection built into them. Great literary works like Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich do both these things wonderfully as we discovered when we introduced literature into our summer CPE program this year.

read the full article

Greetings from Long Island, NY

I made it!! Yes, my bicycle trip from Reading to Long Island has been successfully completed (only about an hour ago). I am exhausted and happy. I have a lot of things about the trip I hope to write about in the next few days (including my sitting in on a PhD dissertation defense for the first time!).
But for now, I just want to celebrate that I made all my goals for the trip (completing it in four riding days, with one rest day in there also) and that I am safe and sound. . . and the weather! It was great. Today, I got awesome views of Manhattan and the Hudson River valley from the George Washington and Triboro bridges. Blue skies. Green trees and grass. Skyscrapers of grey and glass. Sparkling blue waters. Awesome. . . . And I got to see how Harlem (looking quiet and prosperous in spots) is looking these days, as well as the incredibly ethnically diverse and rapidly changing neighborhoods of Queens. . . . What I love so much about New York (among many things!!!) is the way it is always both constantly changing and is also always just as you remembered it from "way back".
Years ago it was the incredibly intense immigrant energies of my own people (Jews!) who gave so many New York neighborhoods their incredible vitality. Now it's largely other immigrant folks, but the basic energy is the same (and I love it!). And it was wonderful to see the Jews still there, too. Around lunch time, I happened to run across a old-fashioned kosher deli (I swear the paneling on the walls was vintage 1952) next to the Long Island Expressway near (my early childhood home of) Fresh Meadows. What a treat!!! I so seldom get to eat meat anymore (not a great offering of kosher options in Reading, PA, as you might expect). . . . Matzah ball soup. Hot pastrami on rye (with mustard). Kasha varnishkes. And real deli pickles. What a treat!!
Anyway, like I said, it was a great trip. :)

On the road

I'm excited! If all goes well -- and God is willing -- I will begin a four-day bicycle ride from Reading, PA, to Long Island tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!

Here's a clickable version of the above map of my route. Each of the green bikes represents a stop on my planned path. It took me many hours to plan the route across northern New Jersey (not exactly known for its bicycle-friendly roads!), but with the help of njbikemap.com and Google Earth I feel pretty confident I've plotted out a survivable path. I did a similar ride from Reading to the Atlantic Ocean (Long Branch, to be exact) last summer, so I have some idea of what's ahead. I wrote about one of the most exciting and inspiring portions of that trip here. This will be a shorter trip because I am only planning on bike riding one way.

Why am I doing this? I am reminded of the famous quote about climbing Mt. Everest -- "because it's there". That is, it will be a real challenge for me, not just physically, but from the difficulty of finding (and following!) a ride-able route. And because I really don't know what I will find out there. Previous trips have brought flat tires, broken spokes and other equipment failures; I hope to be going out with all the tools -- and knowledge -- I will need to handle them if they come. I'll be depending on my own resources the whole way because I'm riding solo.

Why else do I go? The people. The places. The things. It's America out there. It's God's world. It's everything inspiring and exciting in creation. There's no better way to see it then on two wheels driven by your own power!

Say a prayer that my battered bike (and my battered body!!) will hold up for the next few days!

She's no Father Mulcahy

What is it they say? Be careful what you wish for?

Well, for a long time I've been saying that my dream is that chaplaincy will become so accepted (and expected) by everyday people that no one would dare put together a hospital TV show without having a chaplain in it. Well . . . .

clipped from www.cinemablend.com And the casting news continues! We’ve got Kristen Bell joining Heroes, Janeane Garofalo joining 24, and now a 24 alum is joining ER in its 14th (!) season. TV Guide’s Michael Ausiello reports that Reiko Aylesworth (Michelle Dessler on 24) will be joining ER’s cast as the new chaplain of County General Hospital.

But, in all seriousness. even if the character ends up being not the most stellar representative of spiritual caregivers, I think (on the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" principle) that this will probably be a real plus for the profession. . . . I'm wishing for more TV chaplains!!!

PS For those who don't know, Father Mulcahy was the chaplain in the M*A*S*H movie and TV series.

He never got justice -- death of a profilee

I was deeply saddened, today, to hear about the death of Richard Jewel. I remember how the media viciously hounded him. But the real fault was the FBI's. Why did it take them nearly three months to tell people what they knew from the beginning -- that there was never a shred of evidence against Jewell in the Olympic park bombing. All they ever had against him was the fact that Jewell was an unmarried, low-income guy, which matched some FBI desk jockey's "lone bomber" profile.

In fact, the FBI should have been hailing Jewell as a hero he was for spotting the bomb and getting dozens of people out of the way of the deadly blast set by racist Eric Rudolph. I'll never understand why the FBI allowed the injustice of Jewell's torment to go on so long. I just don't get it.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Richard Jewell Dies at 44; Wrongly Linked to Olympic Bomb ATLANTA (AP) -- Richard Jewell, the former security guard who was erroneously linked to the 1996 Olympic bombing, died Wednesday, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said. Jewell was initially hailed as a hero for spotting a suspicious backpack in a park and moving people out of harm's way just before a bomb exploded during a concert at the Atlanta Summer Olympics. The blast killed one and injured 111 others. Three days after the bombing, an unattributed report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described him as ''the focus'' of the investigation. Eighty-eight days after the initial news report, U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander issued a statement saying Jewell ''is not a target'' of the bombing investigation and that the ''unusual and intense publicity'' surrounding him was ''neither designed nor desired by the FBI, and in fact interfered with the investigation.''

Finally!

It won't bring back the two who were murdered, but I'm so glad to hear that these people are finally being released.

clipped from www.nytimes.com August 29, 2007 Taliban Will Release Hostages, South Korea Says By CHOE SANG-HUN and DAVID ROHDE SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 28 — The Taliban agreed Tuesday to release 19 South Korean church volunteers held captive in Afghanistan since mid-July, the South Korean government announced, signaling an end to a wrenching hostage crisis that had gripped the country for almost six weeks. Members of the Taliban movement seized 23 Christian volunteers from South Korea on July 19 while they were traveling by bus from Kabul, the capital, to the southern city of Kandahar. The Taliban killed two hostages, both men, after a series of deadlines passed in July. But after South Korea entered direct negotiations with the militants later in July, the Taliban freed two women on Aug. 13 as a gesture of good will.

Stepping up to the organ donation plate -- a High Holidays plea

The High Holidays -- that time when the cycle of Judaism asks us to consider the implications of our own mortality -- are rapidly approaching. This year, I ask you to consider a possible gift that can come out of your own death: the possibility of organ donation. If you haven't checked the organ donation box on your driver's licence, for example, it's never too late.

Jane Brody -- the author of the Personal Health column in the New York Times -- has an excellent story today entitled, The Solvable Problem of Organ Shortages. Here's an excerpt:

When the wife and younger daughter of Rear Adm. Kenneth P. Moritsugu of the Navy were fatally injured in separate automobile accidents, he authorized the donation of organs and tissues from both of them.

Dr. Moritsugu, acting surgeon general of the United States, calls organ donation “the ultimate act of human kindness.” But the number of donor organs falls far short of the need. As of June, 97,000 people awaited lifesaving transplants, and each day the waiting list grows five times faster than the donation rate.

People typically wait three to five years for donated organs, and each day 17 of them die.

But, as Dr. Moritsugu noted recently in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association, “The shortage of donor organs is a medical problem for which there is a cure.”

At one time there was a lot of concern among Jews that organ donation would be a violation of Jewish law (as Jewish law forbids desecration of the dead body). Most religious authorities have moved past such a position. In my movement (the Conservative Movement), most authorities hold that not only is organ donation permitted but that Judaism's high regard for life as a religious value actually requires it. In the Orthodox world, however, authorities are more reluctant to give a clear green light to organ donation; they do, however, allow it in some cases where it is clear it would save a life.

The real savior

Doctors -- especially surgeons -- have long been accused of tending to acquire a "God complex." But I was still surprised, today, to see one turn up on the pages of the New York Times, especially because the physician in mind is part of a center of biomedical ethics at a world-class medical center:

"I saved your life!" Dr. Larry Zaroff reports telling a man he had treated while years earlier when that man demanded $300 from him in a business dispute. Before Zaroff made this pronouncement, the man, who had been unconscious at the time, had no idea Zaroff had ever treated him.

First of all, in my opinion, it's an act of incredible arrogance for any physician to credit his or herself with saving a life. Zaroff could have shocked this man's chest a thousand times and it wouldn't have helped one bit if the Blessed Holy One hadn't decided to make it possible for the heart to start again.

Second of all, to try and influence another person in a personal business dealing based on what you may or may not have done for them in a professional setting strikes me as a deeply troubling violation of ethical boundaries. Zaroff does say that now that he's "older" he would not do the same thing. But he does not seem to acknowledge the ethical problem. Nor the arrogance of claiming to save a life.

I'm curious what other folks think.

Here's an excerpt from the story:

During surgical residency, I’d learned to control the startle reaction. Don’t raise your head from the exposed heart even if the orderly knocks over the rinse basin or the nurse drops a tray of instruments. I had learned that calm worked best. I was not perfect the day we faced our prospective landlord. My head jumped back, my eyes widened. He did not notice; he had no idea we’d met the day his heart stopped.

After my shock passed, I had the same thought I’d had back then: “Why tell him? Surely he has suffered enough.” . . .

We had left a deposit when we signed the lease. Now the landlord checked the apartment like a lion after a wildebeest, zeroing in on the fireplace . . . He turned toward me. He became adjacent and angry. “You owe me $300,” he snarled, shaking with each word. . . .

I took a deep breath, and I gently asked him if he remembered his heart attack.

“Yes, sure.”

“Do you know your heart stopped?”

“I think so.”

“Well, I was the one who saved your life, brought your heart back.”

He hesitated. “I didn’t know that.”

He turned to the door, distressed, in pain. Turned again. “You still owe me $300.”

The darker side of Facebook

I've only recently joined Facebook, the wildly popular social networking site that started out just being for college students. It's mostly just been a fun way to reconnect with some old rabbinical school classmates and other friends.

But apparently people use it for other reasons, including the spread of hate. Today, a friend asked me to sign a petition demanding Facebook shut down the "F**k Islam" group on the site (and, no, the real group name does not include the asterisks).

I am just appalled that anyone would form such a group and give it such a name. Sure, you can hold opinions criticizing a faith tradition. You can even talk about those opinions on a place like Facebook -- that's what we call free speech. But, if we really do all want to "get along", we have to express our opinions in ways that are respectful, especially when we are dealing with things that others consider most Holy. This goes way too far. It's disgusting and it has to stop.

I really hope this sort of thing is not what Facebook is really all about -- because if it is I'm most definitely not staying around.

Never despair!!

There has been a lot of press about the new book of Mother Teresa's private writings and how she spent the last decades of her life in a deep spiritual crisis where she could not feel the presence of God. Some people are shocked to hear that a woman seen as such a great symbol of piety and service to God could suffer such a crisis of faith.

But Teresa is hardly the first spiritual leader to have a "dark night of the soul." Last week, I spent some time reading Art Green's biography of the hasidic master Rav Nachman, a book that he entitles "The Tormented Master" precisely because Nachman struggled so much with his faith and -- like Teresa -- often felt God to be very distant.

This distance, however, is not the legacy Nachman left. Green concludes his book with an account of some of Nachman's final words to his followers. "It is forbidden to despair!," Nachman is reported to have said despite his weakness from his final illness. "Gevaldt! Never despair!”

It is the spirit of this statement that Nachman left to his followers, Green says, and is why they continue to follow his path to this day.

As we head into this Shabbat that prepares us for the fast-approaching High Holidays, I leave with with these words from the Psalm for the High Holidays, Psalm 27:

שְׁמַע-יְהוָה קוֹלִי אֶקְרָא
Hear, Lord, my voice when I cry

וְחָנֵּנִי וַעֲנֵנִי.
And be gracious to me and answer me.

לְךָ, אָמַר לִבִּי--בַּקְּשׁוּ פָנָי; ׁ.
For Your sake, "seek My Face", says my heart

אֶת-פָּנֶיךָ יְהוָה אֲבַקֵּש
Your Face, Lord, I seek.

אַל-תַּסְתֵּר פָּנֶיךָ, מִמֶּנִּי:
Do not hide Your Face from me.

May God be with you in all that you do, and may you never know despair.

Shabbat Shalom.
#*#

Working the midrashic muscle -- imagination, the search for God, the path to action

I was heading up a steep wooded trail last week when I saw Daniel Matt -- one of the world's greatest scholars of the Zohar and of Kabbalah -- coming down the other way. He surprised me by stopping to talk. "It's easy to miss the turnoff to the overlook," he said. "Look for the tree shaped like an ayin with a little tzitzit hanging down."

It was a beautiful moment that said a lot not only about what a beautiful man Matt is, but also about how we can make Torah a living thing in our lives: Matt was clearly walking through the woods with his imagination -- an imagination primed to see the things of Judaism and the Torah everywhere -- alive and at work. But this mystical imagination was doing anything but taking him away from the world and his responsibilities to other human beings; he was still very much ready to stop and take the action of helping a person in need on his way.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of imagination in our spiritual lives. With my chaplaincy students this summer we did something called verbatim as theological event (VTE). Here, a student shares with a group the story of a visit with a patient. Then the group searches for images that describe the "heart of the matter" in the encounter with the patient.

I don't think of myself as a very visual person, but this summer I found myself growing in my imaginative abilities (what I call, exercising the midrashic muscle) through my participation in these seminars. I saw one encounter as a boat tossed in a storm with somebody on a larger ship reaching out trying to save the person inside, but unable to reach that person. In another encounter, I saw a glass wall standing between two people desperately trying to connect with one another. [Click here for a step-by-step description of how to carry out a VTE seminar.]

If this process stopped with image-making, it would just be an intellectual exercise. But what makes it about faith is that it is in fact meant to lead to action -- action inspired by where we see the hand of God in the encounter and what that tells us about how we can better walk in God's ways in what we do. This process of moving from examining an intense personal experience to taking action inspired by God and Torah is sometimes called theological reflection (see The Art of Theological Reflection by Christian scholars Killen and De Beer for an excellent description of a general approach to this process). But I prefer to call it Midrash HaHayyim, or Living Midrash (I first wrote about this in May).

Midrash, traditionally, was the ancient and highly imaginative process of interpreting the Bible. The ancient rabbis especially loved to "fill in the gaps" in places where the biblical story is especially terse. They did so in a way that often related to the situations they saw around them -- including the injustices from the oppressive empires they lived under. In this way they linked up their experiences with the wisdom of the Torah text. [See what I wrote about in May for a more detailed description of how the Rabbis did Midrash by filling in the gaps.]

This is exactly what we do in Living Midrash. We take an experience that was meaningful or deeply troubling in our lives. By ourselves -- or better, with a group -- we examine our feelings about this experience and the images that arise in our minds from that experience in our search for the heart of the matter. And then we look for what Torah tells us about this kind of experience. What stories in Torah are like our story? What characters in Torah are like us or other people in our story? How is the Torah the same or different from what happened for us? What can we learn from how it was the same or different?

It's the Torah component that makes Living Midrash different from some other kinds of contemporary Midrash. Sometimes people think Midrash is just about imagination and they will call any sort of imaginative process Midrash. But that's not enough. Midrash -- in order to be truly living -- has to be linked back to the tradition, to Torah. It's the link between imagination and tradition that makes it Midrash.

But in order to be truly Living Midrash it also has to follow in the spirit of this famous debate recorded in the Talmud (Kiddushin 40b):

תלמוד גדול או מעשה גדול

What is greater (as a way to serve God), study (Talmud) or action?

נענה רבי טרפון ואמר מעשה גדול נענה ר"ע ואמר תלמוד גדול

Two rabbis disagreed: Rabbi Tarfon says action is greater and Rabbi Akiva says study is greater.

נענו כולם ואמרו תלמוד גדול שהתלמוד מביא לידי מעשה

The Sages answered and said -- study is greater for it brings one to action.

That is, the study we make in this process of Living Midrash should inform us about what the Torah informs us about how to run our lives. It's not enough to stop at insight and imagination. It has to also lead to action.

But we do indeed need to cultivate our imaginations to be able to do our own Midrash and make it alive. That's what I learned from Dani Matt. Not only did he bring his imagination into the woods with him, but the heart of what he teaches has to do with the Jewish imagination. Few works are more imaginative in the Jewish tradition than that great medieval mystical work in which Matt specializes, the Zohar.

The Zohar imagines God and our relationship with God in incredibly fantastic ways. The Zoharist stares at a candle flame and sees not just the blue, white and red of gases combining, but also images of God and Israel and Moses. God sits above the flame in another invisible light. Israel cleaves to the blue-black light below, seeking unification with God. Moses is in the white. (Zohar Bereishit 1:51).

Unification is in fact is a key concept in the Zohar and in Kabbalah. One of the top three contributions of the Kabbalah, Matt taught, is the idea that it is human action that brings about the unification of the "divine couple." That is, the Kabbalah imagines God as having both feminine and masculine attributes (sometimes called Shekhina and Tifferet) and that the great task of the human being is to help bring the unification of these attributes through the actions of the mitzvot.

For me, the great action where I am involved in the unification of God involves my work with patients and my effort to help bring them comfort and healing. It is a form of Tikkun, or repair of the world.

But I could not do it if I did not know that God was there. I could not do it if I did not have the faith that I am serving Torah. I just couldn't do it on my own. It would just be too hard to stand. I just would not be able to stand before the death and pain and suffering I find in the hospital's halls. I need God.

And it's my need of God -- and my desire to draw God in -- that is truly really the only source of what it is that I have to offer patients. I can't transform bodies. I can't work magic. I can only offer the rewards and comforts of faith. I only have my example of how I have tried to invite God into my own life. That's all.

It is the kind of Torah study I did with Dani Matt -- and my own processes of Living Midrash (including VTE) -- that invites God in and makes my work possible.

That's why it's Holy.

Refilling the tank -- the loneliness of the caregiver

I was sitting on the floor in a circle in a yurt this morning with a bunch of other Jews interested in spiritual direction when one person asked the teacher if it could be lonely being a spiritual director (a person who helps guide people on their spiritual journeys).

The question sat with me all day. Loneliness can be a very serious issue for people who make their living -- as I do -- by caring for people in crisis or who spend their days immersing themselves in other people's spiritual issues and concerns. Back in the spring I was working our hospital's cancer units. I was talking with dying people and their families every day, trying my best to offer them comfort by lending a compassionate, non-judgmental ear to hear their fears and concerns.

When the day was over, I was full of all the energy from those encounters and really needed somebody to talk to about it. But I quickly learned what it mistake it was to try to talk to my girlfriend about it. The overwhelming nature of these experiences threatened to crowd out everything else -- including the best stuff -- in that relationship. And so I was left in this strange lonely place where I couldn't connect with the person closest to me about the things that were foremost on my mind. This is the loneliness of the caregiver. And it's why we spiritual caregivers need to do self-care.

In chaplaincy, we talk a lot about "self-care". But, I think people get confused about what that really is for us spiritual caregivers -- sometimes we talk about it as if all it was about was making sure to take time "off" and not working all the time. But no amount of time off alone will renew you in the way you really need to be renewed if you are going to be able to keep doing the work and keep your heart open to people. Self-care also has to mean at least two other things.

First, it means allowing yourself to be cared for -- to be cared for in the same way you offer care to patients and clients. Your friends and family -- as I suggested above -- can't do this for you. You need other spiritual caregivers -- whether it be peers, a psychotherapist or a chaplaincy supervisor -- to be there for you and to hold you (figuratively, usually) in the way you need you, and your experiences and grief from your work, to be held.

And second it means "refilling the spiritual tank". That's what I'm trying to do this week. I'm at a great place -- the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center -- for the week. I'm here for a lot of reasons. Some of it is indeed time to relax. But mostly it's about Torah. It's about studying Torah in community and, through that, reminding myself of all the different ways to connect with God. To remind myself of everything that God means to me. To remind myself of what it is that called me to service -- to become a rabbi and a chaplain -- in the first place. To remind myself of what means to feel God wash over me. To remind myself what it really is I have to offer people who are suffering and hurting.

I'm taking a great class with Daniel Matt -- one of the world's greatest scholars of Jewish mysticism, and the Zohar in particular -- and his wife Hana. Today, Hana led us in a powerful chant of the second half of the sixth verse of psalm 30:

בָּעֶרֶב, יָלִין בֶּכִי;
In the evening, I go to sleep crying.
וְלַבֹּקֶר רִנָּה
But in the morning, I arise singing in joy.

I went for a bike ride after the class and as I was plunging down this one long hill -- feeling the exhilaration from the air rushing by my flesh and the pull created by the gravity of God's earth on my body -- I suddenly realized that I was singing these words to myself over and over again. It's the brilliance of Judaism in the face of life's hurts and wounds. We can't avoid the hurts that inevitably come as long as we walk this green earth. But hope does not die in us. We remain ready to accept that morning of רינה, of joy. What a comfort knowing that the psalms' author -- thousands of years ago! -- felt the same things we do. Suffered the same things we do. And overcame them in a way we still can.

I have so much more I want to write about from this week. So much great learning. So much Torah. Most of that writing will have to wait.

_____________________

One of the main things I am here for is the Jewish spiritual direction class I opened this blog entry with. It is part of the Lev Shomea program led by Rabbi Howard Avruhm Addison and Dr. Barbara Eve Breitman, DMin. It's been a great introduction. I'm considering seeking spiritual direction training as something to augment my pursuit of becoming a certified Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) supervisor. I hope to write more about that soon.

Quiet!!!!!!!!!

There is nice essay in the New York Times, today, by a reporter who suddenly found herself a patient in a very noisy hospital room. She writes:

Grand Central Terminal may be synonymous with noise and haste. But as I recently discovered, it can be a lot quieter than a hospital bed.

Just a few weeks ago, the Times had another interesting article about how a Bronx hospital has tried to address this problem through a "Silent Hospitals Help Healing" program:

The walls along the floor are filled with “SHHH” signs, and workers wear buttons that show a nurse with her finger to her lips. Patients and visitors are also given buttons.

Pieces of equipment like medication carts with squeaky wheels have been repaired, and sound-absorbing ceiling tiles and curtains have been installed.

Workers are encouraged to wear softer-soled shoes and to keep hallway conversations to a minimum. The volume on intercoms has been turned down, and beepers have been turned to vibrate mode. Patients now have the option to wear headphones while watching television.

The reality of noise and interruption is a major part of the patient experience, and, thus, something chaplains need to be aware of.

#*#

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

At hospitals throughout the country, Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) summer programs are starting to come to an end this week. After 11 intense weeks walking the halls of a hospital and talking with patients about life and death and suffering (and where God might dwell amid all of that) many students are feeling deeply attached to their summer "homes".

But they will soon have to let go. The hope is that this summer will end up being more than just a source of "war stories" for them to tell in the years to come about the overwhelming intensity of it all -- the hope is that the students will be able to take the transformation and learning of the summer with them and that they will use it to have a positive impact whatever work they may choose to do in future (whether it be from the pulpit, in chaplaincy, or somewhere else). I have the same hope for myself -- this was my first unit supervising students. I was overwhelmed much of the time, but I hope that I will be able to move past feeling overwhelmed and instead be able to focus to identify and consolidate my points of learning.

My supervisor talked to our students, today about part of this task of consolidating this learning (otherwise known as making "closure"). He used a useful metaphor from one of his supervisors -- a metaphor of investment and making sure to get your return on your investment (ie, interest).

In the CPE context, the investment you make is in the time and energy you put into various relationships. Few if any of those relationships will continue after you leave the program, so if you don't withdraw the investment you will lose it (and the interest -- learning in the CPE context -- that you earned on it). Closure is about making these withdrawals from your CPE relationships.

The way you do it is by seeking out the staff and peers, etc. with whom you formed relationships that had meaning to you. You ask them if they are willing to have a conversation with you. And then you tell them:

• What it meant to know them.
• What you gained from knowing them (ie, what you learned from knowing them).
• What you missed (ie, your regrets of what you weren't able to do with them or learn from them).

Then you listen and see what they say back to you. That is, you give them an opportunity to do the same withdrawing, etc. you are trying to do with them.

____________________

This approach to closure can also be understood through Mueller and Kell's three-part framework (from their classic work Coping with conflict; supervising counselors and psychotherapists):

• 1) Anxiety approaching
• This would be the person who is willing to face up to the task (of saying goodbye) and all the concerns, anxieties and grief associated with it. Mueller and Kell consider anxiety approaching to be the healthiest approach.
• 2) Anxiety avoiding
• This would be the person who tries to avoid the task altogether. A typical way of doing this would be "slipping out" early before anyone has a chance to say goodbye to you. (I have often been guilty of this one!!)
• 3) Anxiety binding
• This would be the person who denies there is any anxiety or change at all. A typical anxiety binding behavior around saying goodbye would be to pretend nothing has changed ("Don't worry, we're not really saying goodbye; we'll stay in touch all the time"). Anxiety binding is the worst approach according to Mueller and Kell. The problem regarding the task of saying goodbye is that all the energy that went into the (now ending) relationship gets binded there and thus cannot be withdrawn to reinvest in building new relationships. Put another way, this person is not able to "move on".

___________________

One of the things I have been learning over the course of the summer is about the expected pattern of a CPE unit over time. Students at the very beginning of a unit, for example, are likely to try and reassure themselves (in the face of the unknown and the anxiety they are facing) by trying to reassure the supervisor -- that is, by telling the supervisor how wonderful the program and the supervisor are and how impressed they are by it, etc. A week or two later, some kind of push-back and resistance ("you're asking me to do too much!!!!!") can be expected. This manifests somewhere later in the unit in the "point of peak frustration". How a student copes with that crisis often is the key determiner of what their most important learnings will be for a unit.

Here are some posts I made that commented on the development of these sorts of things during a unit:

• Getting this party started
• Getting this party started (II)
• Week 3 -- I never promised you a rose garden

And here are some other posts that came out of the work we did this summer:

• Literary Resources
• Getting out of the way (and the illness narratives...
• The best defense is offense -- meeting certification committees
• The joys of supervision
• Where the (theological) rubber meets the road
• Psalm 88 -- going to the bottom in order to get back up

___________________

It really has been a great summer. My prayer is that my students will be able to take the Torah we imparted to them this summer and carry it within their hearts to help foster healing wherever they go. May it be the will of the Blessed Holy One that their congregants, patients, clients, families and friends will all be enriched by their spiritual care and growth.