PlainViews

Rabbi Levi Meier, Ph.D., on rejoicing over the Torah

The Traveling Torah and Healing

The day that our small, “traveling”Torah was delivered to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, January 5, 2006, marked the beginning of the most exciting and rewarding period in my almost 30 years as a Jewish chaplain.

On a daily basis, I have witnessed the extraordinary power of this Torah to reach people at the deepest level of their being. The Torah has enabled them to be more in touch with the Divine manifestation and to feel embraced by God.

The story that follows gives some idea of how the Torah continues to touch peoples’souls on a daily basis.

One day we were summoned to the room of an elderly Russian man who was gravely ill. In an attempt to boost his sagging morale, we took the Torah from the Ark in our chapel and brought it up to him.

When we entered the patient’s room, his eyes lit up at the sight of the Torah. He asked his nurse to bring him some water so that he could cleanse his hands and recite a blessing in preparation for touching the holy scroll. I brought the Torah over to his bedside, where he reached for it gently and lovingly. He asked if I could place the Torah on his bed, next to him, and I complied.

At first there was silence on his part, followed by silent tears. Then slowly, before our eyes, this man seemed transformed. He became visibly livelier, happier and more hopeful. The Torah appeared to have restored his soul in a way that no medication or other intervention could. At long last, he spoke. “Do you know something, Rabbi?”he said. “Even though it’s long after the High Holidays, for me today is a special holiday. It’s my Simchat Torah, the day of rejoicing over the Torah.”And with that, he began to sing, first faintly, and then with more power to his voice, “Sisu ve-simchu be-Simchat Torah u-tenu kavod la-Torah!”Rejoice and be merry on Simchat Torah and give glory to the Torah.

***

This episode gives only a glimpse of the wonderful “Torah encounters”we have on a daily basis.

Our amazing experiences have made me want to share the idea of the traveling Torah with as many of my colleagues as possible. I was delighted to learn that, based on a story in the Jerusalem Post about our experience at Cedars-Sinai, a woman named Sheva Honig donated a small Torah to Mount Sinai Hospital in Montreal. Several other hospitals have also contacted me to learn more about our Torah, and I hope that they will soon purchase similar scrolls for their facilities.

I feel honored to share this idea with my colleagues in chaplaincy. I think that you will find this innovation to be immensely exciting and important. I will be pleased to provide information about how to contact the scribe in Jerusalem who helped us obtain our special Torah. Please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any further questions. (E-mail: levi.meier@cshs.org)

Rabbi Levi Meier, Ph.D., is chaplain of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He is a clinical psychologist and a marriage, family and child therapist. He is the author of Second Chances: Transforming Bitterness to Hope and the Story of Ruth; Ancient Secrets: Using the Stories of the Bible to Improve Our Everyday Lives, and Moses –The Prince, the Prophet: His Life, Legend & Message for Our Lives.

Do you have thoughts about professional practice you’d like to share with your colleagues? Send an e-mail info@PlainViews.org.

Editor’s Note: On February 14, 2007, an article on spiritual care appeared in USA Today. Nick Jacobs sent this response to various interested others. It was sent to PlainViews by Emanuel Williams MDiv, BCC, Health Care Chaplaincy Ministries. We contacted Mr. Jacobs who has graciously allowed us to print this in PlainViews.

From an article in USA Today entitled “Health System Struggles with Spiritual Care,”comes the following quote: “For patients who are dying of cancer, few things are as profound as their relationship with God.”Later in the article there is reference to Tracy Balboni’s study on the spiritual needs of dying patients. “She found that 88% of terminal cancer patients said religion was at least somewhat important to them. And about half had been visited by clergy. Yet Balboni’s research also suggests that hospitals, doctors and even religious communities fail to support the spiritual needs of their cancer patients at the end of life.”

The article went on to say that 70% of the patients’spiritual needs weren't being met by hospital chaplains or others in the health care system.

As a zealot in total support of palliative care and hospice programs, these numbers were not a shock to me, but were, in fact, a further signal that our current national health care system is NOT meeting the needs of our patients.

Those individuals who felt that their spiritual support was adequate also reported that their quality of life on a fifty point scale was nearly 15 points higher than those without spiritual care.

Far be it from me to suggest that we force religion on anyone, but, having said that, there is no reason why spiritual support is not more readily available to our patients. There are hundreds of reasons why our peers don't do this; HIPAA, fear of imposing religious beliefs on patients, or just a lack of belief in the entire concept of the contribution that spiritual care brings to a patient’s care, but we here at Windber Medical Center know profoundly what the true contribution can be from spiritual involvement to all of our patients. We typically deal with hundreds of thousands of patients each year, and one of our commitments to them is the availability of clergy, Eucharistic ministers, and spiritual professionals in our facility or available to our patients 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In God we trust, whomever or whatever you believe that God to be. It is not our intent to confine your beliefs, to restrict your beliefs or to attempt to change your beliefs. It is purely our intent to help to support our patients’beliefs. Is your facility supporting your patients?

Do you have thoughts about advocacy you’d like to share with your colleagues? Send an e-mail to info@PlainViews.org.

“I sure wish someone would tell me what is going on.”This was the exasperated statement of a patient. It reminded me of many other patients who had made similar statements about their desire, no, need to receive information from the medical staff about what was happening to them.

This “need to know”becomes a spiritual issue as it creates anxiety that sinks into the soul of patients as they wait, sometimes for days and weeks, without being given information about what is happening.

I’m not picking on doctors. What I would like to raise, however, is the importance of providing clear, honest information to people who are under the care of any of the many disciplines in our medical system.

When a person seeks medical attention it is because they are afraid. Sometimes the fear is exaggerated and not in proportion to the actual symptoms that are being experienced. For others the fear is absent, even in the face of symptoms that ought to stir considerable concern. Fear is, after all, not a mechanistic response to stimuli, but a soul response to stimuli.

Our souls are all “tuned”differently. Some are tuned to be extremely sensitive and the fear rises quickly with even the slightest symptom. Others of us have had our souls tuned in such a way that anything less than raging symptoms are brushed off as nothing. We have little control over the way our souls have been tuned.

There are many factors that contribute to the “tuning”of our souls: There is our unique personal nature, the temperamental intonations that we were born with; there is also the nurture we received from the family and culture in which we grew up; as well as biological and genetic factors that are still quite a mystery to medical science. We all reached adulthood pretty much “tuned”to respond to the stimuli of life in certain ways. Changing the “tuning”of our souls is difficult and takes an extreme amount of energy and time and often, even after all that, there is little success in altering the “tuning”of the human soul.

Because this “need to know”is a matter of the soul, it is important that we not ignore it. It is important that we be aware of the need, accept responsibility, and take the initiative necessary to find out what is happening to our bodies so that our souls can begin to process what is happening. This then enables us to come to terms with ourselves, our circumstances and our God in the face of health crises.

Because this “need to know”is a spiritual issue, it is my hope that whether we are the holder of the information or the one needing it that we will be kind and gracious, patient and forbearing, as we seek to help one another process life changes in a way that enables us to come to a place of peace and rest.

Do you have thoughts about education & research you’d like to share with your colleagues? Send an e-mail to info@PlainViews.org.

As an Episcopal priest, Ash Wednesday in the hospital starts early with phone calls: ‘Where can I get my ashes?’, ‘When are you coming with the ashes?’are the recurrent questions throughout the day. On the floors, patients, staff, families, and delivery men swarm around, all wanting me and the other priests to dip our thumb into our container of ashes and then make the sign of the cross on their foreheads: “Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return.”For the first hundred or so, I am a priest, helping the faithful connect with the beginning of Lent. After a while, the volume of people becomes overwhelming, and this repeated act of making the sign of the cross on their foreheads becomes for me a meditation on the face of Christ. Young, old, infants, black, white, brown, yellow, straight, gay, lesbian, sick, well, staff, patient –each individual comes with expectation, with hope, and with longing to confirm their membership in the body of Christ. Each individual becomes for me the face of Christ and reflects Him back to me.

At the end of Ash Wednesday, I went with my wife to the Ash Wednesday service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. We brought our seven-week old son, Theodore, with us, after a discussion as to whether we should wait until he was baptized, so that the oil of baptism would be the first liturgical act on his forehead. We heard a sermon from the Dean, in which he described he and his wife bringing their then newborn daughter to an earlier Ash Wednesday service and how initially frightening it was to hear “remember thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return”as ashes were imposed on her head –and then how reassuring it became as he and his wife realized that that which came from God will go back to God, at the end.

We thought this was totally apt, and the Dean’s words had great meaning for us as we brought our newborn son to receive his ashes for the first time. My wife, Storm, and I stood next to each other with our child between us as we presented him to the priest and to God. Afterward, with the feel of my own ashes on my forehead, I held my son. He was so small in my arms –the darkness of the ashes stood out on his forehead, and he looked so little.

Holding him in that context, I looked at him and was reminded of other newborns that I had visited in the hospital. These newborns were in the Neo-Natal ICU, and I had traced the sign of the cross on their foreheads. The difference was that the cross I had placed on their heads was the cross of baptism before they died, to seal and mark them as Christ’s own –for ever.

Holding my own son, he reminded me of these other infants’deaths and I began to understand for the first time what I had done for those other infants and their families, and what my act of baptism had meant to them.

I felt that my child was safe - and I sensed also some of the enormity of other parents’relief that their children, in a different way, were safe as well.

Do you have thoughts about spiritual development you’d like to share with your colleagues? Send an e-mail of any length to info@PlainViews.org.

EthicsWalk addresses spiritual care as an ethical enterprise. It explores why relationships between spiritual care providers and those they serve need protection, and examines what that protection entails. PlainViews invites our readers to share their responses to each EthicsWalk column, which will be published in the following issue.

If you’d like to respond to EthicsWalk, please send a comment of no more than 100 words. You can use the e-form below (click on "hearing from you," link) or submit your commentary to the editors in the body of an e-mail (or as a Microsoft Word attachment) sent to Info@PlainViews.org. Please put the phrase “EthicsWalk” in your subject line.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Abraham Lincoln advised lawyers, “Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.”

Contrary to stereotype, most lawyers practice conflict resolution as Lincoln counseled. Frustrated lawyers frequently lament, “the practice of law would be fulfilling were it not for clients.”

As last month’s column [Vol. 4, No. 1] and the follow-up response [Vol. 4, No. 2] stressed, legal ethics require lawyers to represent their client’s best interests as articulated by the client.[1] This column is not to defend lawyers[2] but to assist readers in using lawyers wisely. Resolving conflict is a collaborative endeavor: the lawyer is the expert on the law; you are the expert on your life. The suggestions apply to professional and personal cases.

Opposing counsel routinely talk with each other and shape settlements. Before you reject or attempt to wring more out of them, remember: your lawyer is trained to spot issues and craft resolutions. More importantly, your lawyer is invested in your best interests without being mired in the present emotional murkiness of the conflict. He or she is ready to close your case and move on. Are you?

[1] The lawyer is the client’s alter, not super, ego. Only in very limited circumstances is a lawyer permitted to withdraw from an active case. What the lawyer thinks professionally or feels personally about a client’s position is irrelevant to the lawyer’s duty to represent.

[2] A 2006 Harris survey found 85% of respondents trusted doctors and 30% trusted lawyers. My read is that litigation seldom makes people happy. In a 1993 American Bar Association survey, 59% of respondents perceived lawyers “file suits that benefit themselves, not their clients.”Perception is reality. Whether true or not, individual lawyers have a duty to recognize, address and perform contrary to these negative expectations.

[3] Many lawyers offer an initial free consultation where you and they can measure mutual compatibility. Upon retention, you should receive written confirmation of fees, services to be provided and any limitations to representation or expectations particular to your case.

We post an ethical or situational concern that has arisen in a facility where one of our readers works. It has no identifiers included. It gives you only the facts of the case. Then, you can respond to that concern. This is an ongoing dialogue, with comments added as they come in. In the following issue, assuming it has been resolved, we give you the outcome from the facility where the incident took place. Please send any cases that you would like considered for inclusion to: info@plainviews.org

We hope that this new addition will help to inform not only those who are dealing with the issue, but will enable all of our readers to learn from the experiences and perhaps mistakes of others.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to unanticipated continuing responses to both the case and the resolution of the case, added responses can be viewed in the archives. Click HERE.

No cases were submitted for this issue of PlainViews. Cases have not been submitted with as much regularity as we thought they would. The Advisory Board of PlainViews and the Managing Editor have discussed possible reasons for this:

–chaplains are loathe to have someone "armchair quarterbacking" what then did or did not do

–fear of even trying to submit a case, thinking that it is unimportant or that no one would be interested

I want to address these possible reasons because I hear from so many chaplains and supervisors how helpful it is to have these CaseConferences and so we do not want to discontinue this section.

When it happened (if important to the case - e.g. overnight, week-end, end of a long shift)

You can send the case in whether or not it is "resolved". Send it to info@plainviews.org.

The editor and staff will then review the case and make sure that it has no "identifiers" that link it to a particular institution, chaplain, or individual. It will then be sent back to the submitter for final approval.

"Armchair quarterbacking" fear: it is understandable that one would worry about this. But consider that all of us, at one time or another, have been or will be where you are now with your case.

Fear of being found out: another understandable concern, but one that is a highly unlikely to ever occur since only the managing editor knows who submitted what and she is not telling....

A case may be "unimportant" or not interesting enough: another understandable concern but consider this –since most of us operate within a confined area, it is hard to determine how what you are dealing with will impact someone else. Chances are, either they have been through something similar already or will go through it in the future. We learn from each other –from our mistakes as well as from our successes.

So, please consider submitting a case from which all of us can and will learn. We deal with situations that may seem "normal" or "usual." To someone else, however, they may be a wonderful learning experience.

Please check the archives below for comments made about the last CaseConference.

Dharma River visuals flow along the legendary rivers of Laos, Thailand and Burma and the camera weaves through Buddhist temples and mystical sites. Passing imagery transports the viewer to places of stunning beauty and spirituality that most will never see.

Travel with the director and cinematographer John Bush along the canals of Bangkok to the mountains of Laos, and on to the golden pagodas of Burma and the Mekong River. Along the way, enjoy colorful footage of festivals and rituals.

“I wanted to create a new kind of viewing experience that would allow someone to have a direct encounter with the sacred spaces of southeast Asia,”Bush says. “The [spaces] have their own presence, and I wanted them to speak for themselves. This timeless art and architecture is part of the world's cultural heritage. It's important to archive these things, to share them."

Dharma River is a meandering spiritual journey. The viewer has two options: watching the film with narration filled with Buddhist teaching that is accompanied by music indigenous to Southeast Asia or listening to the background music along with a chant soundtrack designed for meditation.

Completed: 2005
Running Time: 81 Minutes
Director/Producer/Cinematographer: John Bush

If you are interested in purchasing this film, you can do so at www.hartleyfoundation.org. Just click on “Masterworks”on the homepage for more information. The cost is $24.95 for the DVD.

Sarah Masters is the Managing Director of the Hartley Film Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to cultivation, support, production and distribution of the best documentaries and audio meditations on world religions, spirituality, ethics and well-being.

The Work of the Chaplain is the latest book in the series, “The Work of the Church”by Judson Press. It is paradoxical that the book, although it is relatively short and can be read in a single sitting, is perhaps, the most comprehensive work about the depth and breadth of chaplaincy I have read in recent years.

The book includes chapters on the historical basis for chaplaincy, the various settings in which chaplains serve including: Military, Health Care, Crisis Intervention, Police, Fire, Emergency Services, Prison, Campus, Parish, and Sports and Recreational chaplaincies. The authors address the issues of preparation, credentialing, and endorsement and provide guidance with regard to avoiding minefields into which chaplains may fall. They promote the idea of self-care, and also list some “how-to's”of job seeking. Within each chapter are real-life illustrations that underline the scope of how chaplains make a difference in various settings.

Both authors bring a wealth of knowledge to their writing. They offer the practical experience gained from serving as chaplains in a variety of settings, as well as the grounding theological reflection that comes from their seminary teaching. The book is suited to seminarians, CPE students, or perhaps clergy seeking to understand chaplaincy as a change of calling. If I were seeking one book that would help me understand the spectrum of chaplaincy opportunities, how it differs from congregational ministry, and what is required for me to reach my goal, this would be it.

Paget, Naomi K and Janet R. McCormack. The Work of the Chaplain, Judson Press: Valley Forge, PA (2006) pp 128.

Do you have thoughts about these reviews you’d like to share with your colleagues? Send an e-mail to info@PlainViews.org