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    Facing Illness, Finding God: How Judaism Can Help You and Caregivers Cope When Body or Spirit Fails
    Facing Illness, Finding God: How Judaism Can Help You and Caregivers Cope When Body or Spirit Fails
    Facing Illness, Finding God: How Judaism Can Help You and Caregivers Cope When Body or Spirit Fails
    Ebook217 pages2 hours

    Facing Illness, Finding God: How Judaism Can Help You and Caregivers Cope When Body or Spirit Fails

    By Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler

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    About this ebook

    Find spiritual strength for healing in the wisdom of Jewish tradition.

    Whether you are facing illness yourself, serving as a caregiver, providing pastoral care, or simply wondering where God is when we get sick, the teachings and wisdom of Jewish tradition can help you cope with the difficulties of illness and infirmity.

    With a format designed to accommodate the stressful life of people dealing with illness, Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler helps you focus on spiritual well-being as an essential aspect of physical healing and wholeness. He provides comfort and inspiration to help you maintain personal balance and family harmony amid the fear, pain, and chaos of illness. Combining the stories of real people with insights from Jewish sources, he offers practical advice and spiritual guidance for:

    • Reaching inward to the soul when the body fails
    • Reaching outward to provide strength, comfort, and compassion to the ill or infirm
    • Reaching upward to God through prayer and daily gratitude
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateMar 2, 2011
    ISBN9781580235839
    Facing Illness, Finding God: How Judaism Can Help You and Caregivers Cope When Body or Spirit Fails
    Author

    Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler

    Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler is a noted spiritual leader and educator, recognized for his ability to connect the importance of Jewish tradition with everyday life. He is coauthor of The JGuy's Guide: The GPS for Jewish Teen Guys and author of A Man's Responsibility: A Jewish Guide to Being a Son, a Partner in Marriage, a Father and a Community Leader; Witnesses to the One: The Spiritual History of the Sh'ma and Facing Illness, Finding God: How Judaism Can Help You and Caregivers Cope When Body or Spirit Fails (all Jewish Lights). He is the rabbi at Temple Sinai in Sharon, Massachusetts, and an instructor at the Kehillah Schechter Academy. Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler is available to speak on the following topics: The Spiritual History of the Sh'ma: What "God Is One" Might Mean Not Your Father's Brotherhood: What Being a Jewish Man Meant Then and Now How Judaism Can Help You Cope with Illness Click here to contact the author.

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      Book preview

      Facing Illness, Finding God - Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler

      PART ONE

      Reaching Inward

      Coping When You Are Ill

      My New Normal

      What is health? Most people think good health means not having to think about their bodies. Our physical functioning should be, we feel, an assumption of daily living. Putting aside questions of diet or exercise, we do not often think about our bodies and resent it when we are forced to. We do not want to have to think about the functions of our bodies that should be involuntary: our breathing, our heartbeats, our mobility. Being healthy means feeling normal.

      One of the most threatening aspects of illness is that it challenges our sense of normalcy, of how it feels to be alive. This just isn’t me, we might say to ourselves as we lie there in bed. If there is perhaps one law of human nature, it is that we do not like it when things change, when our sense of being normal is threatened. It is as if our sense of self is in one place while our body is in another. We may sometimes have trouble recognizing the changed body in the mirror.

      If illness is when something in our bodies or minds deviates from being normal, then healing might be considered a return to that feeling of normalcy. But healing can be an emotionally volatile process. It can be a journey full of angst. Who doesn’t want to return to being himself as quickly, painlessly, and effortlessly as possible?

      Everyone else can seem to get caught up in our unwelcome change. Being dependent on others can feel awful. Suddenly, we have to think of timetables for medications, and we might need someone to help remind us. We have to think of changing sheets, and we cannot do it by ourselves. We might find ourselves watching more television than we ever used to, hogging the living room. We can easily feel irritable or depressed. A person might think not only, What has happened to my life? but also, What am I doing to those around me?

      If you open yourself to Judaism’s wisdom, you might find new paths to healing and a new meaning in your unwelcome circumstances.

      If you are casting about for a way to cope with sickness, you can be reassured that Judaism has extraordinary tools and insights that might help you. If you are forced to face illness, you may find that the sages of Judaism have already endured similar trials and have something helpful to share with you in their thousands of years of cumulative experience. If you open yourself to Judaism’s wisdom, you might find new paths to healing and a new meaning in your unwelcome circumstances.

      Stinkin’ Thinkin’

      There are several popular myths about illness that are harmful to our physical and emotional well-being.

      One myth is that disease is a punishment for something that we did wrong or the ploy of a tyrannical god. People shake their heads and mutter, Everything happens for a reason.

      I do not know whether cancer has a reason. It is a cluster of cells that mutates, violates boundaries, and refuses to die. The scary thing is that your disease may not have any reason in the larger scheme of life aside from whatever meaning you give it. If you despair, then your disease is proof that your life is meaningless. Or worse, perhaps you feel you did something wrong and God is punishing you.

      Your past moral deeds have nothing to do with whether or not you get sick. Saints get sick and die. Evil people live long lives. Do not think of your disease as punishment. Just because you are facing a trauma does not mean that you must be somehow deserving of suffering. Among friends I call this stinkin’ thinkin’.

      Another harmful myth is that if we pray for ourselves or another, God will reverse the laws of nature just for us and send a miracle cure. You might resort to bargaining with God, saying, I will never do such-and-such ever again or I will go to synagogue every week. Such a belief is founded on literalist readings of the Bible where God physically parts the Reed Sea or rescues us whenever we are in trouble as long as we offer proper sacrifices.

      Such literalism, however, is a dead end. Even the most cursory reality check shows that this kind of intervention happens rarely, if at all. Not only that, but this reduces the act of prayer to simply wishing. Prayer is far more powerful and nuanced than that.

      You are part of an amazing, fragile world, and you share in both its amazement and its fragility.

      But there is another way of thinking about sickness.Sickness is simply a part of God’s imperfect world, part of the price we pay for living and breathing. The privilege of being able to enjoy mountaintops and summer rain is that we are subject to the same laws of nature that they are. Our blood flows the way streams flow. Our breath blows the way the wind carries the clouds and leaves interact with the air. Our eyes take in light the way crystals refract illumination. We are all part of an extraordinary process of growth and decay.

      You are ultimately an amazing but small animal with a wonderful imagination. You have a limited life span along with every other living creature. You are part of an amazing, fragile world, and you share in both its amazement and its fragility.

      But I Am Not Used to Asking for Help

      When you are seriously ill, one of the first tasks is to acknowledge that you may feel trapped. Perhaps you find yourself confined to a bed, in your home or in a hospital, where people enter your room without your permission. Within this prison exists another prison; your body no longer does what you expect. Your mind rattles around behind the bars of a disobedient physical shell.

      Similarly, loved ones can also become prisoners. You may feel guilty because everyone becomes chained to a routine of medical care, keeping you at home or traveling back and forth to a doctor’s office, eliminating the daily freedoms that too often are taken for granted. You might think, What has happened to their lives because of me? On a deeper level, you may also become a prisoner of anxiety. Worrying may be your central preoccupation. Even if you do manage to watch some television or partake in some other diversion, you may be unable to get your mind away from feelings of concern, guilt, and anxiety about the future.

      In the play Angels in America, a Jewish character named Louis calls an ambulance for his lover, Prior, who is dying of AIDS. He discovers a bloody mess all over the floor, with Prior apologizing for having lost control of his bowels. In shock, Louis begins to plead with God for help while Prior tells him that maybe he should not touch the mess or him.¹ The moment is painfully familiar to many who struggle with how our lives become changed by disease. Sickness can be, at its worst, a form of entrapment. Sufferer and loved one alike become prisoners.

      A prisoner cannot free himself from prison.

      BABYLONIAN TALMUD,

      BERACHOT 5B

      The Talmud tells of a famous rabbi named Rabbi Yochanan who was also a healer (Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 5b). Jewish lore has it that this man was part of a select circle of sages so holy that they could take a sick person by the hand and heal the person. The grasp of his hand healed others.

      One day, one of his colleagues fell ill, and Rabbi Yochanan visited him. Rabbi Yochanan asked his friend whether he had found any solace in his suffering. His friend replied that he could see nothing good in his suffering nor in any divine reward—if it existed—that he might receive for enduring such a trial. It was at this point near total despair that Rabbi Yochanan told his friend, Give me your hand. As the tale goes, grasping him by the hand, Rabbi Yochanan "raised him

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