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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?
I’m currently attending the Conference on Medicine and Religion at Ohio State University in Columbus. This piece was written during a session entitled, “Attending to Suffering and Acknowledging the Limitations of Medicine through Lament,” presented by Drs. Alex Lion, Ben Snyder, and Mona Raed, Rabbi Bruce Pfeffer, and Chaplain Anastasia Holman, all of Indiana University School of Medicine and Indiana University Health System, Sunday, March 12, 2023.
Scent is transient.
We read a lament from our Muslim cousins where their Prophet, by his example, gave those who followd him permission to grieve, to cry, to express sorrow (Hadith on Grief: Death of the Prophet’s son, Ibrahim).
He came and kissed his departed son, and inhaled his scent.
And we thought of the scents we remembered
Through the neglected sense.
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Between Moshe’s initial failure to win over the Israelites to his leadership and the beginning of the Plagues, the Torah interrupts with – genealogy? And an incomplete one at that, listing only the sons of Reuven and Shim’on, and three generations of Levi. It seems to be setting up the yichus of Aharon and Moshe, because the verse immediately after the genealogic information reads, “The same Aharon and Moshe to whom Hashem said, ‘Take the children of Israel out of Egypt.’”
Buried in the genealogy, however, is foreshadowing of several later stories that occur during the wilderness years, including Korach and Pinchas. But the line that caught my attention concerns a figure whose big moment, according to the Gemara, is coming very soon: Nachshon.
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This essay was originally the d’var Torah at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, Shabbat Vayetze/9 Kislev 5783/December 3, 2022. You can view the sources here. Online version originally posted at Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle/Times of Israel.
There are two strange words at the beginning of Parashat Vayetze.
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