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?
I said a strange goodbye last week. After three years, thanks to a computer system “migration,” I had to part ways with… a password.
Most of my passwords these days are ones that Google randomly generates for me, ones I couldn’t remember if I tried. But this was one I created myself, one that, thanks to multi-factor authentication protocols, I wasn’t required to change every 90 days. And it was one that, if I’m being honest, was too tangentially related to the actual words in the phrase for anyone but me to land on.
With several letters, numbers, and symbols altered, the password was ‘Al Shelosha Devarim, the beginning of Mishnah Avot 1:2, which in its entirety reads, ‘Al shelosha devarim ha’olam ‘omed – ‘al haTorah, v’al ha’avodah, v’al gemilut hasadim. “The world (‘olam) stands on three things: on Torah, on service, and on deeds of lovingkindness.”
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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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