Using the traditional Passover seder and its text, the Haggadah, as a template, From Illness to Exodus explores illness and healing—the narrow space, and the way out.
From Illness to Exodus invites the ill person and healer alike to address hard questions with compassion, curiosity, and a mature faith
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Is it enough to say the right thing without feeling it – or to say the wrong thing with the right emotion? Do I have a God complex or impostor syndrome? How do I avoid the extremes and practice with both humility and confidence?
Make today different from all other days – what will you do to achieve this? What stories do we tell about our bad habits to justify them to ourselves? How might we reframe them to make them holier?
When you think about modern plagues, do you think of them as outside forces that are affecting you, punishment for societal ills, or things that you’re doing that harm others?
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?
One of my favorite things to teach to my pre-meds, PA students, or med students is the difference between disease and illness.
The distinction comes from Arthur Kleinman’s book The Illness Narratives. Kleinman explains that a disease affects one human body and does so in a predictable way – so predictable, in fact, that if we can put together the pattern of symptoms, physical exam findings, and test results, along with a clear biological explanation of how all those things got there, then we can say with confidence that everyone who fits this pattern beyond a certain cut-off has the same disease.
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“I never refilled the medicine. Was I supposed to?”
“I didn’t start that diet. I don’t know why, I just didn’t.”
“Yes, I did start smoking again.”
“I know I was supposed to see that specialist/get that test/go to physical therapy, but it got away from me and I didn’t make the appointment.”
If you are a healing professional, someone has said one (or all) of these things to you.
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In 2020, I started playing around with “birthday gematria,” using the Hebrew numerology system that assigns numerical values to each letter. Add up the values for the letters in a word, and every word can have a value, too. Sometimes that gives us timeless Jewish truths (18 is the numerical value of chai, life, leading us to give tzedakah in increments of 18), and sometimes it’s just fun (I once did a whole series of Pittsburgh Steelers’ gematria based on uniform numbers when the team was playing in the Super Bowl).
Unfortunately, my age in 2020, 47, left me with the letters mem and zayin, and the only reasonable word I could make with those was . . . Zoom. Not the encouragement I needed in the summer of 2020, let me tell you.
Today, I turned 53, so let’s try again.
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