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Y . •

90

1111111E1

FRIDAY, OCT. 16, 1987

independent creature? How foolishly tragic
is Narcissus gazing at his own reflection.
Your vitality courses through my veins.
My energy is derived from yours. Can we
ignore our interdependence? We need one
another. We are each other's life — in
sickness and in health.
In the Jewish prayer for healing we pray,
not "heal me 0 Lord and I will be healed,"
but "heal us, 0 Lord, and we shall be
healed. Blessed art Thou, 0 Lord, who
heals the sick of Thy people."
No postoperative praise of illness and
suffering is intended. I do not mean that
illness and pain are somehow good, that
because they can sensitize us, fear and suf-
fering are somehow justified. Sickness,
pain, anguish, torment, and death are
neither rewards nor punishments from
God. In our tradition, it is not piety, but
blasphemy to pursue martyrdom for its
own sake. But how and what we learn from
adversity, how we raise private trauma
into public morale is the way we add dig-
nity to God's name. Not the suffering, but
the refusal to let it subdue our will to live;
not the pain, but the courage and hope that
enables us to overcome despondency are
the signs of God's goodness and reality. No
one struck me down from above to punish
me for my transgressions — God is no
sadist. No one struck me down from above
to reward me with new insight — God is
no clumsy instructor. But God gave me
mind and heart to learn divine matters
from natural events.
I have learned that God's language is in
human behavior; that we are God's
alphabet from aleph to tau We are God's
vocabulary.

Consider the story based on the ambig-
uous biblical verse: "Charity averts death."
Whose death? His mother is ill. The son
quickly calls for an ambulance to take her
to the hospital. In the midst of the turmoil
his father whispers to him that it is Fri-
day and that he should not forget to bring
home a stranger for the Sabbath meal. The
young man is disturbed that his father
would think of poor strangers when his
mother is in such dire straits.
But days later he says to his father:
"Now I understand, father, about the
stranger. You wanted to save mother's life.
`Charity averts death.' "
"No," says the father, "What I asked you
to do I did not because I thought it would
avert mother's death, but because 'charity
averts God's death: "
Without charity, without love, God dies
in this world. We are God's witnesses. If
we are alive to each other, God is alive. If
we live and love and help and heal, God is
confirmed; God's name is exalted.
We prove God's goodness not by philo-
sophic argument but through the demon-
stration of our relationship with His world.
In our behavior we argue God into
existence on earth as He is in Heaven.
I have learned from this experience that
friendship in family and in community is
sacred, and that it is a foolish canard to
declare that "words are cheap." A letter, a
card, a prayer are life transfusions of the
human spirit. A call or a visit is as

therapeutic as the cleverest of medicines;
our ancient sages did not exaggerate when
they wrote "He who visits the sick causes
him to live." (Nedarim 40a).
Do not diminish the mitzvah of bikkur
cholim, of visiting the sick. There is an
ethics, an aesthetics, an art in visiting the
sick. In the abridged Shulchan Aruch the
visitor is counselled to "speak with discre-
tion and tact, so as neither to revive him
(with false hopes) nor depress him (with
words of despair); not to visit a patient
whose condition is an embarrassment to
him or for whom conversation is difficult."
Why are friendship and family so vital?
Because the fear we experience is not sim-
ply of physical death and dying. There are
deaths in abandonment, -deaths in friend-
lessness, deaths in living without love,
without passion, without purpose. Death
and dying wear many disguises; life and
recovery must call upon many allies. There
is a profound correlation between illness
and isolation, and between health and
community.

In a Jewish tale the angels band
together to conspire against God's intent
to form Adam and Eve in His own image.
They are jealous that ordinary men and
women should inherit such spiritual
treasure. The angels plot to hide goodness
and truth from the human being. One
angel proposes to hide God's mystery in
the highest mountains, another suggests
concealing it beneath the deepest seas. But
the shrewdest angel counsels, "Men will
search for godliness in the remotest of
places. Hide it within them. It is the last
place they will search for the miracles of
godliness."
I received gifts of books in the hospital
and during my recuperation. But I have
come to learn what Buber concluded when
he grew older. When in his youth he was
asked which he preferred, Buber thought
he preferred books to people. Books are
easy to handle, easy to open and to close,
to remove or place back on the shelves.
Books are manna from heaven, while
humans are like hard, brown bread on
whose crust he breaks his teeth. But as he
grew older, Buber changed his mind
"I knew nothing of books when I came
forth from the womb of my mother, and I
shall die without books; I shall die with
another human hand in my own."
What I fear, now that the energy returns,
and the scars fade, is that I will forget the
dark caverns of fear and those bright il-
luminations of love. There is, of course, a
natural comfort in the mind's capacity to
forget the fearful past; but the consolation
would be questionable if loss of memory
led to loss of gratitude. I now understand
better the biblical imperatives to
remember; to remember not only the Sab-
bath and the triumphs of the past, but the
violations and defeats of our history; to
remember the bondage in Egypt and
villainy of the Amalakites so as to rejoice
in our freedom and our strength. "Out of
my depths, I have called unto God:' ❑

Rabbi Schulweis is spiritual leader of Valley
Beth Shalom in Encing California. This article
first appeared in Moment magazine.