Elizabeth Berger

Evolution of Multi-faith Chaplaincy:
A Jewish Parable of the Non-fiction Variety

On a fragrant May morning, on the long walk from the North Shore University Hospital campus parking lot at the top of the hill down to the main complex of buildings at the bottom, Chaplain Intern Elizabeth Berger matched her steps with her breaths, occasionally double checking to make sure her kippah was still on her head. Elizabeth was a Reform Jewish lay leader who had only learned to read Hebrew a few years prior. She was also a married woman with three children, but Berger was not her married name.

Elizabeth’s Jewish journey had begun in her car, as one in a long procession of dutiful, culturally-identified parents in her temple’s Hebrew school drop-off line. At some point, the hypocrisy of her own Jewish illiteracy got to her, and, instead of just dropping her children off, she had parked her minivan and traipsed into the temple with them. Through the poignant process of preparing for rituals that she had missed growing up, Elizabeth had become a kind of poster child for late-in-life Jewish learning.

While studying to become a lay leader in the Reform movement, Elizabeth had even investigated the possibility of attending rabbinical school. There, the daughter of the yeshiva boy who had broken with his Orthodox family learned that her twenty-five year intermarriage precluded any possibility of ordination.

It had been a pivotal moment. Elizabeth understood that she was not the only intermarried Jew ever to have been instructed on the Reform movement’s uncharacteristically traditional position, nor was she likely to be the only one astonished by it. Still, she suspected she just might be the only one ever to have heard it from a plainly sympathetic, openly gay rabbi with a life partner and two small children.

In this particular rejection, Elizabeth would find extraordinary blessing. For one thing, it made for a great story – one with a distinctly farcical quality – and no one loved a great story like Elizabeth. For another, she had found in Rabbi Victor Appell, an incomparable supporter; one who heard her calling to serve, and would go the extra mile in helping her plot her next move.

The result had been the decision to enroll in clinical pastoral education. With the baby boomers aging and the majority of American Jews intermarried like their prophet Moses, Elizabeth had succeeded in persuading her interviewers that she could bring something needed to the profession and solace to a generation who might benefit from her specific support.

Once accepted into the program, she was stunned to find out that her viability as a Jewish chaplain would most be challenged by members of her own faith. If the rabbinate did not want Elizabeth, the official certifying organization for Jewish chaplains wanted her even less.

It was a position rooted in fear. Elizabeth was done with fear.

At this point, Elizabeth had suspended any attachment to exact professional goals. Even by the most unforgiving Jewish standards, she was doing good work, and she was doing it now, healing the world by visiting the sick for twelve hours a week. She was sailing through the air on a divine zip line to nowhere in particular, toward the foggy promise of a potential career, hanging by the threads of her traditional lace head-covering and the pseudo-legitimacy of her maiden name. Elizabeth still had options. She was determined to finish four units of clinical pastoral education, the same 1600-hour minimum required for chaplaincy certification. She was nearly half-way through.

As she did on most days, unless it was raining, she looked forward to the moment when the north face of the building that housed the hospital’s main entrance came into view and the way its mirrored panels reflected nine full stories worth of sky and light and tops of trees. It was her way of reconciling G-d with the inhabitants of the rooms behind those windows; a kind of prayer for their healing, a wish for the heavens and the greenery to somehow find their way inside.

Elizabeth always took note of the view from the patient’s room. Like sickness itself, she found in the disparity of the patients’ views a veritable study in the fact that life doesn’t always seem fair. The hospital had grown piecemeal over a series of decades, in spurts that matched the generosity of its benefactors, and the result was a dizzying maze of connected buildings. Scurrying between patients on more difficult days, Elizabeth liked to imagine that someone must have been chasing a chicken and the architect was following that guy.

It simply could not be helped. Some patients had the north-facing view that was reflected back to Elizabeth as she approached the complex now; others faced ugly utilities installed on the rooftops of shorter buildings; and, some faced a brick wall fewer than three feet away. Elizabeth wondered – worried actually – about what G-d might be perceived as saying to a cardiac patient in a small private room facing a brick wall. For those patients in particular, Elizabeth budgeted considerable time, thinking it best to keep the focus off the window and more on the door and who came through it and how long they were willing to stay.

The paradox of the situation was that the greatest luxury of facing north was not reserved for the patients who could afford the carpeted, wood-paneled “penthouse” level of the hospital. Rather, Elizabeth considered the luckiest ones to be those on a floor low enough that they could appreciate the view of the waterfall garden, where the administration had made good use of a fallow stretch of steep hill alongside a concrete outdoor staircase.

From their perspective inside the hospital, these patients even had an advantage over Elizabeth, as the garden was more visible to them than accessible to anyone outside, surrounded by poured concrete walls on three sides, in a depression too deep to be visible from anywhere but the staircase itself. Still, Elizabeth frequently encouraged families, especially those dealing with long-term illness, to get out of the hospital and climb to the landing, where they could look over the railing and get close to the side of the waterfall, away from the beeping medical equipment and the frenetic energy of the hospital floor.

She would propose this only as a healthy outlet for people under stress; a kind of substitute for walking in nature. She did not ever use the word “sanctuary,” and she certainly did not share her strange perception, that the water cascading over the rocks in cyclical perpetuity was a symbol of G-d’s promise.

For as unclear as the outcome of this chaplaincy training was going to be in conventional terms, the education in pastoral care itself had been life-changing for Elizabeth; she was evolving past her cultural orientation towards deed-doing and learning to simply “be”. She had grown in self-awareness and connected with G-d through her peers and her interactions with patients in a way that had eluded her even in her synagogue. This was perhaps the most stunning example of the thing that had crystallized here in the hospital: This is where Elizabeth had learned the absurdity of how crazy irony can intersect with indescribable blessing.

This is what was on Elizabeth’s mind on this May day as she made her way down the short staircase from the residents’ parking lot and around the path leading to the Pastoral Care offices. She looked left, stopping for a moment to take in the reflection of the building named for Don Monti, a teenager lost to leukemia in 1972 and the son of the same affluent caterer for whom Elizabeth had worked as a bridal attendant when she was in high school. Now, his grieving philanthropist father was gone too. Elizabeth spent another moment imagining the reunion between father and son. She then turned right into her building, signed in at her office, attached her beeper, and came out again to finish making her way down to the hospital.

Treading down another short staircase and across two slanted parking lots, mirrored leaves billowed on their branches high in sight, and Elizabeth prayed. She prayed for her patients. She prayed for G-d to guide her as a healer and for her ability to learn to go deeper. She said a traditional prayer of thanks for this moment and for everything so far. As she approached the three-flight concrete staircase that obscured the hospital’s prettiest garden, she thanked G-d for light and reflection, both in the world and in her thinking.

In that moment, from the exact spot where she stood, she saw it: An unspoiled mirror image of the enclosed garden and its striking fluid centerpiece; the waterfall now cascading down huge, graduated stone slabs directly towards Elizabeth.

She touched her kippah and proceeded down the U-shaped staircase. Smiling, she turned left at the first landing beside the waterfall. She was closer to it now, but this vantage point couldn’t possibly compare with its reflection.

She descended the second leg of the staircase and crossed the landing. She was about to turn and skip down the last flight when she looked up and noticed – for the first time ever – the reflection of herself.

(Author’s note: The assignment was to write a brief story/parable that indicated how you saw yourself during this past CPE unit. We were encouraged to be creative.)

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