What if medical encounters were meetings of two human beings, together forming a covenant to achieve healing?
Take a peek inside Healing People, Not Patients to see how you figure into the message.
Come explore how you can be a part of the solution.
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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 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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There’s a reason I’m not a surgeon.
Last month our handyman came by to definitively fix our shower doors. I’d been “fixing” them almost as long as we’ve had them: hanging them back on the track when they fell, reattaching the wheels when the screws came out, or reattaching the bottom bracket when it wiggled completely off, and the interior door swung loose. They were installed crookedly on day one, owing partly to my entire house being crooked (old mine shafts and shifting Western Pennsylvania bedrock) and partly to shoddy workmanship. I could never buy us more than a couple of months of being able to use both doors before I had to tell everyone not to touch the interior door or else. I know how to think, not so much how to wield tools. I could see where the problem was coming from, but in the implementation, something always went wrong. I needed Mark to bail me out.
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Originally delivered as the D’var Torah at Congregation Beth Israel, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Shabbat Yitro, 5784 (February 3, 2024). Event co-sponsored by JACS Vancouver (Jewish Addiction Community Services). Edited for clarity.
When I was a senior in high school, a band called The Black Crowes released their hit song, “She Talks to Angels.” The song opens, “She never mentions the word ‘addiction’ in certain company.”
Even so, she must mention the word more often than the Torah does, which is never. The “Torah” of working with people grappling with substance use must be extrapolated from other topics we encounter in the text, like laws relating to electricity or space travel. Unlike those twentieth-century inventions, however, addiction has been around since the dawn of time – we just didn’t mention the word.
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