Explorations of the relationship between psyche, spirit and physical healing have become increasingly popular in recent years, and now the Jewish community is developing its own approach to the mind-body connection.
In synagogues around the country, special “healing” services are being conducted regularly and bikur cholim committees, which arrange visits to sick Jews, are being established.
The trend is propelled by Jews’ search for spirituality, and by the quest for community and meaning often when someone faces a crisis, such as serious illness.
And while many of the popular publications on the mind-body connection are being written by Jews, generally draw on Eastern spiritual traditions and ignore what Judaism has to say.
Complicating the effort to establish a Jewish vocabulary for spiritual healing is that the terminology is often understood as it is used by Christian fundamentalists, to mean a laying on of hands, or to mean a new-age syncretism of Eastern religious traditions and crystals.
Promulgating the Jewish healing concept are two young groups and a large handful of rabbis who are making a concerted effort to ensure that Jews dealing with illness know that Judaism has a rich trove of resources to offer.
“It’s about retrieving traditions,” said Rabbi Janet Flam, West Coast director of the Jewish Healing Center.
“A lot of Jews have turned toward other traditions in times of crisis because the language of help has been more accessible.
“But it didn’t seem like a people who have had so much suffering as we have wouldn’t have resources to help ourselves,” she said.
The Jewish Healing Center is a 3-year-old San Francisco-based group that holds healing services and spiritual support groups, trains rabbis, chaplains and health care workers, has a hospice care program and produces educational material.
The organization also is preparing a conference, “Refaeinu 1994: A Practicum on Healing and the Rabbinate,” which 150 rabbis are expected to attend.
One of the center’s founders is Rabbi Rachel Cowan. She looked to Jewish sources while her husband, Paul, was dying of leukemia when she was in rabbinical school at the Hebrew Union College in 1987 and 1988.
She discovered that the sources in Jewish texts were helpful, but that their content, as well as their language, needed translation.
“I was looking for wisdom and found that most of the (classic Jewish) commentaries didn’t respond personally to the individual, but spoke of grief as a metaphor for the grief of Israel rather than for individuals.
“I realized the need to bridge a gap between the individual in pain and tradition, to create a modern sensibility,” she said.
A complementary approach to the subject of Jewish healing is promoted by the Coordinating Council on Bikur Cholim of Greater New York, which focuses on the Jewish tradition of visiting the sick.
The 7-year-old organization trains synagogue groups in the New York area to serve Jews who are ill or disabled or are elderly and lonely.
It is a commitment at which very traditional Jewish communities excel but many other congregations often do not, said Rabbi Isaac Trainin, the organization’s founder and executive vice president.
There recently has been a resurgence of interest in the practice, and he estimates that nationally there are between 400 and 500 synagogue bikur cholim groups.
The council issues an annual resource guide listing such programs across the United States and in 16 other countries.
It conducts an annual conference on issues relevant to the tradition, and holds five miniconferences a year for coordinators of synagogue bikur cholim societies, rabbis, Jewish communal workers and health care professionals.
Topics for these forums range from AIDS to coring for retarded Jews to legal issues related to health care to Jewish healing.
Yet Jewish healing, its advocates admits, suffers from an image problem.
“People still have an image of things they have seen on religious television,” said Peter Knobel, rabbi of Beth Emet/The Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Evanston, Ill., and leader of a Jewish healing service there.
“We’re trying to figure out a better way of talking about it, to find new terminology,” he said.
Jewish healing experts also make a distinction between the notion of spiritual healing as it is understood in popular culture and its meaning within a Jewish paradigm.
Much of the popular literature on the connection between mind and body “helps people feel empowered to mobilize their emotions and mind to have some impact on their physical health, creating unrealistic expectations that this will happen,” said Cowan.
In the Jewish tradition, “healing is not curing, but making one strong and mobilizing one’s resources to live with as much presence as possible in the face of an illness,” she said.
Services of healing conducted by the Jewish Healing Center and by synagogues around the country are generally separate from the congregation’s main worship service.
Participants suffer from a variety of diseases and grief, including cancer, AIDS, infertility and chronic illness. Some have recently had serious surgery or lost a loved one.
Services often begin with song or a niggun, a wordless tune.
At Beth Emet, the Thursday night service begins with the lighting of a pair of candles and a guided meditation on the theme of light using biblical or kabalistic imagery. The mood of the monthly service is quiet and meditative.
It is followed by another meeting to explore Jewish resources designed specifically for people with chronic illnesses.
Beth Emet is also organizing a healing service designed for professional health care workers that will explore ethics from a Jewish perspective.
At Boston’s largest Reform congregation, Temple Israel, the monthly healing service attracts participants from the eight hospitals that are within two blocks of the synagogue, according to Rabbi Elaine Zecher.
The service is publicized by hospital chaplains and social workers. People come “looking for spiritual solace,” said Zecher.
The service contains readings about struggling with spirituality and adversity, a lesson on Judaism and healing, and Maimonides’ blessings for physicians.
In addition to a biweekly healing service, San Francisco’s Jewish Healing Center offers three spiritual support groups, led by a rabbi and social worker or clinical psychologist, for Jews with specific illnesses.
There are groups for people with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and one for women with breast cancer. A group for people with family members living in nursing homes will be started shortly, said Flam.
The center’s hourlong healing service opens with a niggun.
Next, participants are invited to ritually wash their hands and give charity, which is distributed to groups that aid the ill and their families. After opening blessings, participants recount the miracles in their lives.
The rest of the liturgy for the service combines traditional and non- traditional prayers for healing, songs and silence, study and personal sharing.
Both the Jewish Healing Center and the Bikur Cholim Coordinating Council hope to expand into national organizations.
“Practitioners and consumers of Jewish healing there are a log of,” said Cowan. “The question is if we can now find the people to pay for it.”
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