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Arthur Kleinman taught that every person who suffers has their own “Illness Narrative.” If you struggle with illness, or care or advocate for someone who does, what is your narrative? What is it like to be ill, and what would getting well look like in your world?
Contact us to invite Dr. Jonathan Weinkle to speak at your event or teach your group: medical providers, faith-based organizations, healthcare training institutions, or anyone else who wants to hear about healing with humanity.
Find out more about the “Perfecting Patient Communication” curriculum, developed with the support of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation. Check in regularly for tips on how to block out the noise and hear the person, and how to respond so they know they’ve been heard.
3,000 years of Jewish wisdom, 3,000 people seeking healing, and one nice Jewish doctor with messy, curly hair trying to use one to make sense of the other. Take two stone tablets and call me in the morning?
Being sick, especially being chronically ill, can feel like being trapped in a narrow place, with no way out. Even professional healers can feel trapped, not knowing how to lift that person up. One of the oldest stories in the world, the exodus, is a tale of escaping that kind of trap. For the past five-plus years, I have been working on a book that uses the story of the exodus to help understand illness and healing—the narrow space, and the way out. At long last, the book is finished, and not a moment too soon. In this hour where everything seems to be closing in on us – personally, professionally, societally – I hope I can provide some road map of the way through.
From Illness to Exodus asks hard questions about illness, loss, and suffering—questions that literally keep people up all night—using the traditional Passover seder and its text, the Haggadah, as a template. It invites the ill person and healer alike to address these questions with compassion, curiosity, and a mature faith that can handle the uncertainty of being human.
The book is available on Amazon or through my publisher Wipf and Stock (sign up for their newsletter and you can get a 40%-off coupon for one book!). Please read it, share it with friends, and put it to good use – around your seder table, in your own recovery from illness, or in your work to help others heal. In learning and doing together, may we come to be like the words that Mara Cohen illustrated so beautifully on the cover: “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy. He goes out crying, carrying his bag of seeds; he comes in rejoicing, carrying his sheaves (Psalm 126:5-6).”
Everyone in Florin heard the scream.
In S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, known to most Americans as William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, the evil Prince Humperdinck tortures the hero, Westley, to an agonizing end. At the moment of his passing, he lets forth a death scream that can be heard across the city and into the countryside. No one knows what it is – except for one man. Inigo Montoya, the Spanish master swordsman whose father was slain before his eyes when Inigo was only six.
“Inigo grabbed the giant and the words began pouring out: ‘Fezzik – Fezzik – that is the sound of Ultimate Suffering – I know that sound – that was the sound in my heart when Count Rugen slaughtered my father and I saw him fall – the man in black makes it now – “[1]
And the Egyptians made it then. At the culmination of the plague of the first born, on the night that the Exodus began, “And Pharaoh arose in the night, with all his courtiers and all the Egyptians—because there was a loud cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead.”[2]
“A loud cry” – in Hebrew, tz’akah g’dolah. The cry of Ultimate Suffering, as Inigo Montoya would call it, that one cries when one loses a parent, or a child, or – everything.
This is not the only place in the Tanakh where someone cries like that. What’s remarkable about this is whose crying we are noticing.
The phrase wouldn’t have caught my attention at all if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve chanted a similar phrase on Purim a dozen times: z’akah g’dolah u’marah, a great bitter cry,[3] the cry Mordechai utters when he learns that Haman plans to destroy all the Jews in the Persian Empire. That phrase is no surprise: in the foundational text of Judaism, finding out that Mordechai the Jew is capable of suffering great pain and evoking our sympathy is completely on-brand.
More surprising is Genesis 27:34: Kishmo’a ‘Esav et divrei aviv vayitz’ak tz’akah g’dolah u’marah ‘ad me’od. “And upon hearing the words of his father [that Ya’akov had already received the blessing meant for Esav], Esav cried a very great, bitter cry.” The Torah shows us the raw emotions of Esav, the brother who we’ve already been told shall have no part in the inheritance that will become the Jewish people, and to whom later generations would equate the Romans and other enemies of the Jews – the Torah makes Esav at least as human as Ya’akov, and certainly capable of the same emotions.
At a minimum, then, the verse about the cry of the Egyptians is teaching us that, like Inigo Montoya, the cry of Ultimate Suffering is a cry we must recognize when others cry it, even when those others are unlike us, even when they are our bitter adversaries. Inigo and the Man in Black had never met as friends; before he hears the cry in the woods, the last time Inigo had seen Westley was when they were swordfighting to the death atop the Cliffs of Insanity. Yet his heart instantly breaks for his former rival’s distress.
But the Esav verse should have been enough to teach us this. Why do we need two examples of such a cry from one of Israel’s rivals to make this point? There must be another lesson.
Notice the word missing from the Exodus verse: marah, bitter. Both Mordechai and Esav cry “a great, bitter cry.” The Egyptians’ cry is great, but it is not bitter. Why not?
Think about what happens next in the other stories. Mordechai, once he has assured the safety of the people, leads a campaign of revenge against the forces within the empire who allied with Haman and still wanted to carry out his plan even after he was executed. Esav, after he’s done crying, vows to lie in wait and then kill Jacob once their father is no longer living. They are behaving in the manner of their crying – they are bitter. Bitter people look for someone to blame, someone on whom they can inflict the pain they are feeling – the way Humperdinck took out his pain and anger on Westley (is this a column about Torah or about the Princess Bride? And really, what’s the difference?).
Even our hero Inigo is out for revenge: “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!” He’s so obsessed with it that when he finally gets the revenge, he tells Westley, “I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with myself.” Westley’s answer? Piracy, of course.[4]
What do the Egyptians do? Unlike their leader, they do not harden their hearts to the suffering of the Israelites. When they are suffering under the weight of a plague of darkness so heavy they cannot move, they provide their Israelite neighbors with silver and gold as an act of subversion against Pharaoh.[5] When the plague of the firstborn strikes, the Egyptians don’t choose bitterness – they choose repentance. “The Egyptians urged the people on, impatient to have them leave the country, for they said, ‘We shall all be dead.’”[6] Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz explains, “The Egyptians realized that they had been stricken because they forced the Israelites to stay in their land.”[7] They could have turned on the Israelites, initiating a bloody war that would have ended, as they said, with all of them dead. Instead, they said, “enough already.”
I had the Aliyah when that line of Torah was read this past weekend. Staring down at Exodus 12:30 in the sefer Torah was like staring into the seething mouth of a volcano, knowing the pain that those Egyptian parents were going through that night. Ellen Frankel, in The Five Books of Miriam, comments in the name of Mother Rachel, “With the final plague, all of Egypt feels what it’s like to be a slave girl, who has no control over her fate. And with the death of every firstborn, every Egyptian family knows what it’s like to be crushed like dry grain between millstones.”[8] Every Egyptian family, and almost every family of every nationality that I care for on a daily basis. We are all staring into that same volcano.
No political pundit or military leader can tell a story that will make those feelings okay. They will never be okay. The only question is whether those feelings will lead to a bitterness that cries for revenge, or to the ability to tune in to another bereft parent’s cry of despair. The cry is the same whether that parent is an Israeli Jew or a Palestinian Muslim, a Russian or a Ukrainian, an indigenous Guatemalan fleeing violence or a white person in rural Kentucky who has lost more than one child to overdose or suicide. Choosing the second path is not easy. Even the Egyptians quickly forget their compassion and fall right in line when Pharaoh changes his mind and decides to pursue the Israelites to the sea.[9]
But choosing that path, of compassion and not bitterness, is the whole reason the Israelites were freed in the first place: so they could be reminded ad nauseum, thirty-six times in the Torah, that we should remember what it was like to be strangers in Egypt and be kind to strangers among us.[10] So that we could be told, “Do not hate an Egyptian.”[11] Just before the miracle of the Sea of Reeds, Hashem says to the people, “As you saw the Egyptians today, you will never see them again.”[12] This fearsome enemy you are seeing now will never appear that way to you again. Our sages believed that as the Egyptians drowned in the sea, Hashem forbid the angels to sing a song of victory out of sorrow for the death of Hashem’s creatures.[13] And one Haggadah illustration, from a 17th century Venetian edition (shared with me by my friend Dr. Murray Gordon), even shows the Israelites pulling floundering Egyptian charioteers out of the water after reaching the other shore safely.
Listen. That is the sound of Ultimate Suffering. I know that sound – and so do you. Let go of your bitterness and reach out your hand.
[1] Goldman, William. The Princess Bride. New York: Ballantine, 1973. p 251.
[4] Not in Goldman’s novel, or apparently in Morgenstern’s original either. But it is in a film adaptation one or two of you may have seen… or memorized.
[5] Etz Chaim Chumash, 387, comment attributed to R. Benno Jacob.
[7] Steinsaltz on Exodus 12:33
[8] Frankel, 107.
[13] Megillah 10b, quoted in the traditional Haggadah text
I grew up watching Happy Days on TV. In one episode, Arnold’s, the drive-in “greasy spoon” where the characters all hang out, burns to the ground. When the gang tours the wreckage after the fire, Fonzie (played by Henry Winkler to whom I am not related) tries his signature cool guy move of banging the jukebox to get it to start playing a song.
The charred front panel of the jukebox falls pitifully to the ground.
We are all trying to go home again. Back to our former state of health, back to our youth, back to the good old days – those Happy Days the show refers to, the “simpler time” of the 1950s that people living through the turbulent ‘seventies thought they were nostalgic for. Ironically, when my friend Jeff Finkelstein lost his father Norman last fall, part of his nostalgia was to display the books his father had written – including my favorite, a book called The Way Things Never Were, about how misplaced all that 1950s nostalgia really was.
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