A man doesn’t have time in his life to have time for everything. He doesn’t have seasons enough to have a season for every purpose. – Yehuda Amichai
I would like to “not have time” for the series of all-consuming crises of the last several years. To decline calendar invitations to the next war, the next pogrom, the next pandemic, or the next life-threatening illness. To choose not to attend the sleepless nights, the bouts of decision paralysis, or the existential angst of being hated, unfairly criticized, or embattled in the street or in the media. Sadly, I have not been given an option, and it is really cramping my schedule.
Amichai suggests we must live these things and the good things, love and laughter and forgiveness, in the same moment. It makes my head spin – but he is right.
I write as a doctor. Healing, whether it’s one human being, a wounded community, a devastated country, or a divided world, is a difficult business. When I learn Torah, it’s often with an ear toward how I can become a better healer – and this weekend, weary of attacks on my profession and its tools at home, exhausted from the string of crises mentioned above, I was looking for anything that could point me in the right direction.
My friend Rabbi Michael Werbow, on the eve of his son’s bar mitzvah this weekend, reminded me that there are two different stories of Creation. Each contains a different vision of how humans should interact with the newly formed world: “fill” and “subdue” it, or “serve and keep” it.
I thought of Soloveitchik’s “two Adams” in The Lonely Man of Faith. Adam One is the doer, the achiever, the one who wants to build rockets to the moon. Adam Two is the relator, the one who speaks with Hashem – and the one of whom Hashem says, “It is not good for this Adam to be lonely.” Like a lot of doctors, I have a bit of each Adam in me – and like a lot of doctors, I struggle to make time to be both of those Adams. Adam Two usually loses – Adam One is pretty pushy and earns more money to keep the lights on. Ask me on a bad day and I’ll tell you that Adam One is the epitome of what’s wrong with healthcare.
As the Bar Mitzvah, and then his older sister, chanted the parsha the next morning, I noticed the comment in the Etz Chaim (on Bereshit 2:4) that the combined name of God, Hashem Elokim, appears 20 times in the creation story, and only once in the whole rest of the Torah. Hashem (YHVH) signifies the relational, intimate God; Elokim signifies the God of justice and law. It hit me – there are two creation stories because God is following Yehuda Amichai’s advice. God is living both aspects at once – and that’s what we humans, created in God’s image, need to do to have “enough time.”
That’s a tremendous challenge. In an ideal world, we all want to be both technically brilliant and compassionate, firm and flexible, efficient and generous with our time. As Amichai reminds us, a person’s soul is very professional, but “his body remains forever an amateur. It tries and it misses, gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing, drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.” We have lofty goals and lowly outcomes.
Humans are terrible at multitasking. Doctors are the worst, because we think we’re good at it, a stunning Dunning-Kruger effect. Yet we often need to multitask: attending to physical, verbal, and emotional data as we interact with a patient; thinking through diagnosis, treatment and prognosis all at once; juggling education, paperwork, scheduling and reassurance in the same fifteen minutes.
The challenges are not confined to a single patient, either. Any physician, other than those being portrayed on TV by Hugh Laurie or Morris Chestnut, has more than one patient, and we are often required to “listen” to multiple voices and attend to multiple problems at once, when definitively choosing any one over any other will result in delayed care, anger, or worse. Rabbi Michoel Rosenberg teaches that humans can’t actually do this – but God can. He quotes the Mekhilta: “God spoke all these words, saying – human beings cannot hear two people screaming at them at once, but the One Who Spoke the World into Being is not thus. Rather, even if all of creation come and cry out before God, God hears their cries.” (R. Michoel Rosenberg on Shavuot: What Did We Hear at Sinai? Ta Shma podcast, https://open.spotify.com/episode/54nAkb239fiuwfIR4lB9iX) God can even appreciate that people suffer on both sides of a war – something humans are especially terrible at doing.
I spend a lot of time thinking, writing and teaching about how to honor the Divine Image in my patients (including ones who have come to this country from opposite sides of the same conflict), but there’s a bigger challenge here. How can the human healers, who are also created in the Divine Image, better emulate God in our work? How can we learn to overcome the deficiencies of our ears and hear multiple voices at once? How can we embody both our techy, nerdy Adam Ones and our warm, fuzzy Adam Twos in the same conversation? How can we squeeze joy and sorrow, diagnostics and small talk, personal and professional into a quarter of an hour?
There, too, the parsha provides an answer. In the first creation story, humans are created “male and female” all at once. In the second, a single being is created – so that when God determines that loneliness is bad, God draws forth a second human from the side of the first. Why does God do this? To be an ezer k’negdo – a helper who is equal? A helper who is opposed? Maybe both. Both provide an answer to the question – we do the impossible of actualizing multiple traits and tuning into multiple noises by not doing it alone. We partner with the people we care for, and the people who form our team, in a covenant – an alliance – of healing.
That sounds like something I can definitely find time for.
Originally published October 19. 2025, at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/time-to-heal/.
If you enjoyed this piece, please have a listen to my new podcast, “Healing People, Not Patients,” launching October 21, 2025, at https://healing-people-not-patients-bb069895.simplecast.com/. Future episodes will post right on the Podcast tab on this website, but for now check out the feed.
